Do We Have a Structural Unemployment Problem?

September 10, 2013September 9, 2013Danny Vinik 1 Comment

That was the question that economists Peter Diamond, Dean Baker and Kevin Hassett debated yesterday afternoon in a panel discussion at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). Moderated by AEI’s Michael Strain, the panel did not disagree on much, particularly its emphasis on the need for government programs to help the long-term unemployed.

Nobel Prize winning economist Peter Diamond, now professor emeritus at MIT, kicked off the debate by arguing against the oft-repeated claim that the current unemployment problem is not just cyclical, but is structural as well. He focused on the Beveridge Curve, which graphs the unemployment rate compared to the job vacancy rate. It’s shown below:

When the unemployment rate is high, the vacancy is rate is low as that generally coincides with recessions when employers aren’t hiring. As you can see from the graph above, the concern amongst economists is that there are now more job vacancies for higher levels of unemployment in the past few years compared with the recent decade. However, Diamond was dismissive of this, nothing that over the long-term, the Beveridge Curve fluctuates dramatically and often crosses back above itself after recessions.

“This is not a tight, technical relationship,” he said. “This is a curve that moves all over the place, in part for reasons we could identify, in part not.

“The path back being above it has happened a number of times before and sometimes after that you stay above,” he added. “Sometimes after that when you get back toward full employment, you’re back to the old curve or even below it. So the issue of thinking about how to interpret the path we’re seeing is something that really calls for digging underneath these aggregates.”

Diamond emphasized that a couple other economic points indicate that this is a cyclical unemployment problem. In particular, the lack of wage growth in any major industry is very surprising if the structural unemployment theory is true. If there was a structural unemployment problem, firms would be unable to find workers with the adequate skills and would have to increase wages to fight for the scarce talent. But that hasn’t been the case, Diamond said. Wages have been stagnant.

He also examined the construction industry in particular to see if the change in long-term unemployed construction workers’ employment has been any different than changes for long-term unemployed workers in other industries. When he looked at the data, he found few differences. This rebukes the idea that long-term unemployed construction workers have been unable to reenter the labor force due to a mismatch in skills.

Dean Baker, the Co-Director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, added an additional layer to Diamond’s argument, noting that the Beveridge Curve has shifted upwards only for the long-term unemployed, not for the short-term unemployed. This is evidence that there was not a structural employment problem for the long-term unemployed when they were part of the short-term unemployed. The issue began when they became part of the long-term unemployed.

The final panelist, AEI’s Kevin Hassett, focused almost entirely on the problems of those workers.

“When you create a stock of folks who have been unemployed for a long time, then it makes it uniquely difficult to reattach them to the labor market,” he said. “There’s been insufficient attention to the emergency of the long-term unemployed.”

Hassett joked that he’d received a surprising amount of praise from liberal organizations recently for his promotion of government jobs programs to help those workers. Yet, even Hassett in conjunction with liberal economists has been unable to convince policymakers to implement such a program. This, he noted, is devastating to those workers, who see significant negative effects on health and wages due to their long-term unemployment. For those reasons, this is a problem that Congress cannot kick down the road.

The longer we wait to confront this pressing issue, the worse it will become. Unfortunately, the lack of interest from Congress may mean it will get much worse.

Republicans Won’t Accept an Infrastructure Bank Financed by Debt

September 9, 2013Danny Vinik Leave a comment

Business Insider’s Josh Barro has a nice piece this morning listing five ways that President Obama could improve the economy. I agree with him that Obama should nominate Janet Yellen to head the Fed, allow more homeowners to refinance and prioritize standing up to Republicans on the debt ceiling/budget debate over appointing Larry Summers to the Fed. I disagree with Barro on approving the Keystone pipeline, but that’s for environmental, not economic, reasons. On his third point though, I don’t see what Obama can do:

Propose an infrastructure plan that isn’t designed to draw Republican opposition. Democrats keep attaching tax-increase poison pills to their infrastructure plans and then acting surprised when Republicans won’t support them. In today’s low-interest rate environment, infrastructure spending should be financed with debt, not taxes. Obama should try again for an infrastructure bill without any revenue offset. As a sweetener, he should offer to repeal the Davis-Bacon Act, which forces contractors on federally-funded infrastructure projects to pay inflated wages. Davis-Bacon repeal would make infrastructure spending more cost-effective and more appealing to the Republican-held House.

Here’s the thing though: an infrastructure bank funded by debt would be unlikely to pass Congress. In the Senate, it would be welcomed by most Democrats and could pick off enough cement-loving Republicans to garner 60 votes. Maybe. In the House, it would be a major uphill battle. The majority of House Democrats would likely support it, but the majority of House Republicans, who are more concerned about cutting spending than rebuilding our infrastructure, would not. That would put Speaker Boehner yet again in the position of deciding whether to break the Hastert Rule again. If he is so wary to do so over something as big as the debt ceiling, what makes us think he would do so over an infrastructure project?

Thus, I don’t see any way that an infrastructure bank financed by debt gets to the President’s desk. And the President knows this. That’s why all of his infrastructure plans have been funded through tax increases. Barro is right that the best policy would be to finance those projects via debt (and I like his Davis-Bacon repeal sweetener). But the GOP won’t allow it so Obama has turned to Plan B.

Don’t Crush the Fed’s Independence

September 9, 2013Danny Vinik 1 Comment

Felix Salmon wrote a piece a little while ago arguing that President Obama’s nomination of Larry Summers to head the Federal Reserve would be the culmination of the politicization of the institution. He noted:

Make no mistake: Summers would be the most political Fed chair in living memory. Greenspan was pretty bad, especially when he testified — in clear support of the Bush administration’s tax cuts — that we had reason to be worried about budget surpluses. But Summers has been one of Obama’s closest economic advisers since the day that Obama took office: he’s much closer to Obama than Greenspan was to Bush.

Summers has spent most of the past five years doing everything in his power to shape and advance Obama’s agenda. Obama, of course, is very happy about this, and would love to reward Summers for his loyalty by handing him the Fed chairmanship.

…

That’s a move even Clinton would never have dared make: he kept Greenspan at the Fed for his whole presidency. And it sets a horrible precedent: the next Republican president will henceforth have no compunctions whatsoever about appointing a party hack to the post. From here on in, if Summers gets the job, we won’t just be voting for president in presidential elections. We’ll be voting for Fed chair, too. And the Fed will become just as politicized as the Supreme Court has become.

Salmon is being a bit overly dramatic here. While Obama’s nomination of Summers would be treated as a political appointment, it would also be the selection of a highly qualified economist who has extensive experience in and out of government. It wouldn’t be as good of a choice as Yellen. But it would still be pretty darn good. A Republican administration couldn’t nominate just anyone for the job. It would still have to be highly qualified candidate. And Mitt Romney’s rumored front-runners to take over for Ben Bernanke (Glenn Hubbard, John Taylor and Greg Mankiw) would have been equally as political Summers would be. Republicans are already working under the assumption that the Fed isn’t independent and we were already voting for a Fed Chair last November.

In a response to Salmon’s post, Slate’s Matt Yglesias commented that he doesn’t think this is a bad thing:

These are, however, both dysfunctions induced by the cult of central bank independence. A central bank chief who saw himself as a close political ally of the president, and recognized that poor macroeconomic performance would reflect poorly on the skills of his friends, colleagues, and protégés on the economic team, might be willing to put inflation paranoia aside. Even better, precisely as the Obama team apparently “worried” back in 2009, financial markets might believe he’d be willing to tolerate more inflation. That would be a de facto rate cut, and would boost the economy.

Of course, in the longer term, this strategy only works if the central bank chief really iswilling to overlook a bit of inflation in order to boost the economy. The belief that he’ll do it starts the cycle, but doesn’t end it. So the mere fact that people worry Larry Summers won’t be independent enough counts as a consideration in his favor. But to really seal the deal, he has to follow through and actually compromise the Fed’s inflation-fighting mission in order to help his friends in the White House.

I’m still not sold on the idea that he’s the best person for the job. But at the end of the day, Summers’ ties to the White House are a feature, not a bug. If Obama goes with him, as it looks like he will, let’s hope Summers doesn’t forget that he owes his position to a relatively narrow circle of friends that just so happens to include all the key economic decision-makers in the administration, and he owes them some favors.

This is a pretty scary post from Yglesias. Why not just make the Federal Reserve a cabinet in the government? There’s a very specific reason that the Fed is an independent institution: the best monetary and regulatory policies are not always in the best interest of the President and his administration. In the aftermath of the Great Recession, this has not been the case. Yglesias is right that the best thing Bernanke could have done was to allow for more inflation to spur on greater economic growth, which would’ve helped Obama stay in office. But that is just the case right now. It’s easy to think of counterexamples when a Federal Reserve chair too close to the President could lead to bad macroeconomic outcomes.

For instance, at times the Fed may have to raise interest rates to quash inflation, but this can induce a recession, which is certainly not in the President’s interest. This is what Fed Chair Paul Volcker accomplished in the late 1970s. Starting in 1977, the Fed started to raise interest rates, causing the economy to enter into a nasty recession. In 1980, President Jimmy Carter was defeated by Ronald Reagan, thanks in large part to the poor economy. The Volcker-induced recession may have cost Carter a second term (there were plenty of factors), but it tackled inflation. A less independent Fed may have been slower to raise rates to cut down on inflation. Is that something we want?

Or take regulation. New regulations impose compliance costs on companies. Many rules are created to prevent future crises. They hinder economic growth in the meantime, but are vital to the economy in the long-run. Yet, a less independent Fed Chair could feel pressure from the White House to implement looser financial regulations to spur on greater growth in the near-term and let a future president deal with the long-run costs. That sounds like a recipe for disaster as well. Thus, it’s incredibly important that we have an independent Federal Reserve.

If Obama nominates Summers, he won’t be selecting the best candidate for the job, but it will still be a very good one. It won’t be the culmination of the politicization of the Fed and that’s a good thing. It will be a strong choice and Summers will likely do a good job in the position. Let’s not blow this out of proportions.