Daily
May 16, 2023
New @federalreserve research shows the majority of unemployment in 1980-2021 was concentrated in a Secondary segment of 14% of the population that experiences high labor churn, vs. a Primary segment that is almost always employed.
Workers in the primary sector, who make up around 55% of the population, are almost always employed and rarely experience unemployment. The secondary sector, which constitutes 14% of the population, absorbs most of the short-run fluctuations, both at seasonal and business cycle frequencies. Workers in this segment experience six times higher turnover rates than those in the primary tier and are ten times more likely to be unemployed than their primary counterparts. The tertiary segment consists of workers who infrequently participate in the labor market but nevertheless experience unemployment when they try to enter the labor force.
The American labor force grew by 32.8M workers between 1995-2022, and 70% of that growth consisted of immigrants or children of immigrants. Immigrants and their children are 29% of the total American workforce.
From 1995 to 2022, the U.S. labor force increased from nearly 131.6 million workers to over 164.3 million—an increase of nearly 32.8 million workers: 16.1 million of that increase came from immigrant workers (49%) and 6.7 million were children of immigrants (21%), according to data from the Current Population Survey’s Annual Social and Economic Supplement. Just 9.9 million were U.S.-born citizens without a foreign‐born parent. The actual effect of cutting off all immigration would have been even greater since the working immigrant population would have declined without more immigration by about 4.5 million. Immigrants have increased from about 10% of the U.S. labor force in 1995 to 18% in 2022, and immigrants and their children have gone from 18% to 29%.
Glenn Hubbard argues that Congress should legislate “a spending limit for the US linked to a long-term average of federal revenue.”
A decade ago, Tim Kane and I proposed a spending limit for the US linked to a long-term average of federal revenue (adjusted for inflation), triggering Congressional action to reduce spending or to raise taxes if large deficits persist. Congress could only override it with a supermajority. The precise mechanism is less important than Sweden’s intuition that a longer-term fiscal framework and direct accountability are needed. Such a mechanism separates worries about debt from the issue of the debt ceiling. Adhering to the budget framework allows future clean increases in the debt ceiling as long as the framework is in place. This would be an advance over our present stand-off and adding near-term spending restraint offers a win for McCarthy.
According to an @TheEconomist analysis, Europe has significantly more economic exposure to China than the US. 8% of public European firms’ revenues are from China relative to 4% for American firms.
Europe is more economically exposed to China than America is. Some 8% of publicly-listed European firms’ revenues are from China, compared with 4% for American ones, according to Morgan Stanley. Europe and America send a similar share of goods exports to China (7-9%), but because Europe is a more trade-intensive economy its sensitivity is higher. Multinational investments in China are worth 2% of Europe’s GDP compared with 1% for America. We have come up with a yardstick of “total China exposure,. We measure each country’s exposure as a share of its own economy. The European big six’s total China exposure has hit 5.6% of their combined GDP, up from 3.9% in 2011. That is higher than America’s at 4.2%. There is a big range: Italy and Spain are at just 1-2%, France and Britain are at 4-5%. Germany is a huge outlier at 9.9%.
A new @WSJ survey found that 45% of small business owners are seeking to expand their workforce in the next year, down from 59% in May of 2022.
The portion of small-business owners who expect to expand their workforce over the next year was below 50% for the second month in a row in May, hitting the lowest level since June 2020, during the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic, according to a recent survey conducted for The Wall Street Journal. Forty-five percent of entrepreneurs said in May they expect to expand their workforces in the next 12 months, according to the survey of nearly 500 small-business owners by Vistage Worldwide, a business-coaching and peer-advisory firm. That’s down from 47% in April, 58% in March, and 59% in May 2022.
Researchers have found a mutation that protected a man with early stage Alzheimers from dementia until he was 67. @Nature
When the researchers scanned his brain, they found high levels of the sticky protein complexes known as amyloid plaques, which are thought to kill neurons and cause dementia, as well as a protein called tau that accumulates as the disease progresses. The brain looked like that of a person with severe dementia, says study co-author Joseph Arboleda, an ophthalmologist at Harvard Medical School in Boston. But one small brain area called the entorhinal cortex, which coordinates skills such as memory and navigation, had low levels of tau. The study challenges the theory that Alzheimer’s disease is primarily driven by amyloid plaques, which are the targets of several drugs recently approved by the US Food and Drug Administration. The drugs effectively remove amyloid from the brain, but lead to only a moderate improvement in rates of cognitive decline.
May 15, 2023
A @federalreserve analysis finds the recent changes in asset prices have benefited middle aged workers, who can now buy assets at lower prices, compared to retirees, who are primarily asset sellers.
A change in asset prices affects an individual's welfare only if they buy or sell the asset. Otherwise, the change in wealth implied by a change in the price of an asset is only "on paper." For example, a family who faces no financial constraints and lives in the same house for its entire life is not affected by changes in the value of that house. A key takeaway from our analysis is that the change in wealth is not a good proxy for the change in welfare. The top panel in figure 3 shows that the age group that has benefited the most from the asset-price changes in this tightening cycle are those near age 40. By contrast, this age group has seen large declines in wealth. We find that middle-aged individuals benefited significantly from these asset price movements, primarily driven by the decline in the price of equities. Retirees, on the other hand, were hurt by these asset price movements. These welfare results sharply contrast with the changes in wealth these groups have experienced: young people, whose few assets are concentrated in housing, have seen their wealth rise a little; people in middle age and older, who hold more equities than any other age group, have seen sharp declines in their wealth.
As the baby boomers start to die their children are poised to inherit $16T over the next decade.
Of the 73 million baby boomers, the youngest are turning 60. The oldest boomers are nearing 80. In 1989, total family wealth in the United States was about $38 trillion, adjusted for inflation. By 2022, that wealth had more than tripled, reaching $140 trillion. Of the $84 trillion projected to be passed down from older Americans to millennial and Gen X heirs through 2045, $16 trillion will be transferred within the next decade. Individuals with at least $5 million and $20 million in cash or easily cashable assets make up 1.5 percent of all households. Together, they constitute 42 percent of the volume of expected transfers through 2045, according to the financial research firm Cerulli Associates. That’s about $36 trillion as of 2020—numbers that have most likely increased since.
.@M_C_Klein notes that the experience of Japan suggests that fewer workers supporting more dependents does not necessarily lead to inflation.
Japan—which has gone through the gray transition first—shows that an aging society is not inherently prone to inflation. In fact, Japan was once maligned as the singular example of deflation attributable to macroeconomic mismanagement following the end of the 1980s debt bubble. Encouragingly, Japan also shows how to minimize the challenges associated with massive demographic changes. Even though the working-age population of Japan has been shrinking for decades, the number of Japanese workers has been rising as women have entered paid employment in size. Japan’s “young elderly” (60s and 70s) have also increasingly remained in employment, or re-entered employment, to help take care of the “old elderly”. Japan may be an extreme case, but it could also be a model for others. The U.S. is projected to have much more favorable demographics than most of the other rich countries (and China), but it too has a large untapped supply of would-be workers who could help reduce the burden of providing for retirees and other dependents.
1/3 of outstanding mortgage balances were refinanced during the pandemic housing boom, including $430B in home equity extraction. @NewYorkFed argues this “will potentially provide significant support to future consumption.”
In the end, fourteen million mortgages were refinanced during the COVID refinance boom, and these refinances will have effects on the mortgage market for years to come. Many borrowers who refinanced during the boom have improved either their cash flow, through a reduction in payments on their existing properties, or their liquidity by extracting equity from those properties. Approximately five million borrowers extracted a total of $430 billion in home equity from their refinancing. Meanwhile, nine million refinanced their loans without equity extraction and lowered their monthly payments, resulting in an aggregate reduction of $24 billion annually in their annual housing costs.
Prime age (here 21-64) college educated workers are now moving out of the 12 most expensive metropolitan areas in the US.
It appears in domestic migration data that, years after lower-wage residents have been priced out of expensive coastal metros, higher-paid workers are now turning away from them, too. For most of this century, large metros with a million residents or more have received all of the net gains from college-educated workers migrating around the country, at the expense of smaller places. But among those large urban areas, the dozen metros with the highest living costs — nearly all of them coastal — have had a uniquely bifurcated migration pattern: As they saw net gains from college graduates, they lost large numbers of workers without degrees. At least, that was true until recently. Now, large, expensive metros are shedding both kinds of workers.
.@FedGuy12 notes that the replenishment of the Treasury General Account will likely come from households, who are now the marginal buyer of Treasuries. This will possibly drive bank reserves below the Fed’s Lowest Comfortable Level of Reserves.
Bank reserves are on track to approach a common estimate of the Lowest Comfortable Level of Reserves (“LCLoR”) within a few months. At the moment, reserves sit around $3.2t and a common Fed estimate places LCLoR at around $2.2t (8% of GDP). In addition to quantitative tightening, two events may soon reduce bank reserves to around $2.2t. First, Reverse Repo (RRP) is likely to steadily increase as Money Market Fund (MMF) assets continue to rise and Federal Home Loan Bank (FHLB) debt issuance declines. Second, the Treasury General Account’s eventual replenishment will likely be financed largely from reserves. The decline in reserves may only be temporary, as persistent bill issuance would eventually redirect liquidity out of the RRP and back into the banking system.
The increase in borrowing costs since the SVB collapse so far is equivalent to ~ 100bps for the banking sector, putting pressure on net interest margins. Torsten Sløk @apolloglobal
Spreads first moved up to a higher level after SVB and then another higher level after FRC, showing that the ongoing banking crisis is having a permanent negative effect on the economy. Put differently, the increase in borrowing costs since SVB failed corresponds to a 200bps permanent Fed hike for regional banks and 50bps permanent Fed hike for large banks. Weighing these estimates together using the shares of loans and leases accounted for by small and large banks, respectively, gives an economy-wide Fed tightening of a bit more than 100bps for the entire banking sector. In short, the jump in funding costs for banks is permanent, and it has become a lot more expensive for many banks to run their business, and the banking crisis is not over.
Greek internal devaluation is working. While Greek GDP is still 20% under pre-crisis levels Greek exports were up 90% between 2010-2021 relative to 42% for the Eurozone.
After shrinking by almost a quarter from peak to nadir, Greece’s output remains substantially below pre-crisis levels. Reforms have not only stabilised an economy in freefall but also led to some real improvements. Chief among them is trade: between 2010 and 2021, the country’s goods exports soared 90 per cent, compared with 42 per cent in the euro area as a whole.
.@michaelxpettis notes the rise in Greek exports is coming at the expense of its trading partners, “there is a real problem with our global trade system when export prowess is mainly a function of the repression of domestic demand.”
The article also notes that average Greek wages are down more than 25% in real terms since 2008. GDP in real terms is down 20%. This, it turns out, is the secret to export "success". By lowering wages and crushing domestic demand, Greece must export more of what it produces, even as total production has fallen. Its export "success" is mainly the obverse of a brutal drop in wages, and Greece "now has one of the highest rates of relative poverty in the EU." There is a real problem with our global trade system when export prowess is mainly a function of the repression of domestic demand. Countries become successful exporters not by boosting domestic productivity but rather by cutting back on domestic wages. The result is that expanding trade means weaker global demand, which in turn can only be countered by rising debt. And because Greece's export "success" is driven by lower wages, its success also puts downward wage pressure on its trading partners.
.@iamstevenpedigo and @NateMJensen write that the CHIPS Act, which requires state and local subsidies to access federal dollars, has thus far been gamed by corporations to the detriment of state and local governments.
Offering tax breaks and other incentives to corporations has been proved to be one of the least effective ways for localities and states to grow their economies. State audits and independent evaluations of these programs found poor targeting of incentives, weak oversight and excessive costs that harmed rather than benefited local governments. The CHIPS Act and the Inflation Reduction Act are threatening to give [unproductive tax incentives] an enormous infusion of steroids. Micron chose to build in upstate New York [after] the state offered a staggering $5.5 billion in tax credits over the life of the project … costing local and state governments upward of $95 million annually, far more than they are likely to gain from hosting the new facilities. In February, Ford agreed to build its new electric vehicle plant in Michigan, but only after extracting a promise of as much $1.75 billion in state and local incentives...enough money to pay all the new workers’ salaries for around 15 years.
US federal tax collections are running $250 billion short of recent CBO projections.
Wall Street and Washington got jolted this month by government warnings that the U.S. could become unable to pay all its bills as soon as June 1. That crunch came months sooner than expected, raising the specter of a default on federal obligations unless Congress increases the debt ceiling. The reason: the expected annual gusher of tax-season payments didn’t flood into the Treasury. When the Congressional Budget Office analyzed tax collections for the current fiscal year through April, the tally fell about $250 billion short of predictions from just a few months ago.
May 12, 2023
A wealth effect from the rise in asset prices during the pandemic period can explain over 80% of the 2.2M “excess retirements” from 2019-21 among US workers aged 55+. @mfariacastro
The U.S. labor force participation rate (LFPR) experienced a record drop during the early pandemic. While it has since recovered to 62.2% as of December 2022, it was still 1.41 pp below its pre-pandemic peak. This gap is explained mostly by a permanent decline in the LFPR for workers older than 55. Table 2 shows that between 45% and 82% of the 2.2 million excess retirements can be explained by wealth effects for those aged 55-70 or 55 and older. For the entire 2019-2022 period, between 20% and 36% of the 3.3 million excess retirements can be explained by wealth effects.
Related: Retirements, Net Worth, and the Fall and Rise of Labor Force Participation
American public debt as a % of GDP is now higher than Portugal and Spain and on track to be higher than Italy by 2028 and Greece by 2030 @ChrisGiles_
The US federal budget is haemorrhaging money. The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office calculates that in the first seven months of the 2023 fiscal year, underlying government revenues are down 10% with spending up 12%. This leaves the federal budget deficit more than three times larger than in the same months of the 2022 fiscal year. The CBO’s latest forecasts show the level of federal debt held by the public as a share of national income to be 98% in 2023, just 7.6% below its wartime peak in 1946 and on track to exceed it in 2028. For comparison, UK public debt, also at a multi-decade high relative to gross domestic product, is still less than half the level it was at the end of the second world war. To make a comparison with eurozone countries that required support in the 2010s, Portugal, Ireland and Spain already have lower gross debt levels than the US, IMF forecasts show US debt set to exceed that in Italy by 2028 and Greece by the end of the decade.
Higher interest rates were historically positive for bank stocks but that relationship has broken down as higher rates have negatively impacted bank assets according to Torsten Sløk @apolloglobal
It used to be the case that higher long-term interest rates were positive for banks because higher long rates meant wider net interest margins. But since the Fed started hiking rates last year, this correlation has broken down, see chart above. Now higher rates are negative for banks because it has a negative impact on their assets, and higher rates and an inverted yield curve increase the risks of a recession and hence credit losses.
Weekly
Week of February 13, 2023
.@fuxianyi estimates that the Chinese population is currently 1.28 billion (vs 1.43 billion estimated by World Population Prospects).
While the United Nations’ 2022 World Population Prospects puts the Chinese population at 1.43 billion people, I estimate that it is now smaller than 1.28 billion. Even if China succeeds in increasing its fertility rate to 1.1 and prevents it from declining, its population will likely fall to 1.08 billion by 2050 and 440 million by 2100. The country’s share of the world’s population, which declined from 37% in 1820 to 22% in 1950-80, will fall to 11% in 2050 and 4% by 2100. The share of Chinese people aged 65 and older will rise from 14% in 2020 to 35% in 2050. Whereas five workers aged 20-64 supported every senior citizen aged 65 and older in 2020, the ratio will continue to decline to 2.4 workers in 2035 and 1.6 in 2050.
.@JonHaidt cites the percent of undergraduates diagnosed with a mental illness and argues that an epidemic of anxiety and depression started impacting young Americans in 2012.
There was no sign of a problem before 2010, and the epidemic is well underway by 2015. You can also see that the rate of depression is much higher in girls, as is the absolute increase (since 2010 an additional 18% of girls suffered from depression in 2021, compared to an additional 6% of boys), however, the relative increase is similar in both sexes: around 150%. The rate had more than doubled before the covid epidemic. The 2020 data were collected in early 2020, just before covid restrictions, and the 2021 data were collected a year later before vaccines were widely available. You can see that covid accelerated the rise in depression in that last year, but it was already rising really fast.
The @sffed estimates that historically a 1pp increase in the federal funds rate reduced rent inflation by 3.2pp over two and a half years suggesting the current tightening will bring rent inflation down.
We estimate that, during the period from 1988 to 2019, a policy tightening equivalent to a 1 percentage point increase in the federal funds rate can reduce rent inflation—measured by 12-month percentage changes in the personal consumption expenditures (PCE) housing price index—by about 3.2 percentage points, but the full impact takes about 2½ years to materialize. Based on housing costs’ share in total PCE, this translates to a reduction in headline PCE inflation of about 0.5 percentage point over the same time horizon. Although average rents are slow to respond to policy changes, growth of asking rents on new leases has started to slow following recent monetary policy tightening. Our finding suggests that this tightening will gradually bring rent inflation down over time, thereby helping to reduce overall inflation.
Week of February 6, 2023
Evidence from Sweden finds a strong relationship between cognitive ability and earnings up to annual earnings of ~$64k. There are no significant differences among the top three income percentiles. @ECSR_Soc
The figure above shows cognitive ability levels expressed with annual wage on the horizontal axis. Cognitive ability plateaus at high levels of occupational success. Precisely in the part of the wage distribution where cognitive ability can make the biggest difference, its right tail, cognitive ability ceases to play any role. Cognitive ability plateaus around €60,000 [$64,200] at under a standard deviation above the mean. There are no significant differences in ability between the three top income percentiles, despite there being 594 cases in each percentile bin and despite those in the 100th percentile earning more than double the wage of those in the 98th percentile. Past a certain wage threshold, having a higher wage is no longer telling of cognitive ability. The average score individuals in the top percentile achieved as adolescents on the cognitive-ability test is 7.15 ± 0.11 (95% confidence interval). On a stanine scale this amounts to less than a standard deviation (+0.86) above average.
Treasury’s spending on the interest on the debt is up 41% year-over-year (to $198 billion from $140 billion) for the first four months of the fiscal year. CBO will update their estimate of net interest on the debt as a percentage of U.S. GDP next week. @wsj
The Treasury’s spending on interest on the debt is up 41% to $198 billion in the first four months of this fiscal year compared with $140 billion in the same period last year, according to a Congressional Budget Office estimate of spending through January. In projections last year, the CBO said that spending on net interest on the debt as a percentage of U.S. gross domestic product would roughly double from 1.6% in 2022 to 3.3% in 2032. Those estimates, which the nonpartisan agency will update next week, assumed that the Fed would raise the federal-funds rate to 1.9% by the end of 2022 and reach 2.6% by the end of 2023.
.@ernietedeschi builds a new measure of average hourly earnings (AHE) gains in non-housing services (NHS) sectors. The measure suggests that wage growth is coming down rapidly, contributing to declining overall inflation.
This blog post presents a wage measure that Council of Economic Advisors has constructed to be specific to NHS industries, called “NHS AHE.” To summarize, NHS AHE [non-housing services average hourly earnings] is a weighted average of the hourly wage in 175 detailed nonfarm payroll sectors from the monthly Establishment Survey, weighted by each sector’s share of 2019 labor costs in final demand consumption of services excluding food, energy, and housing. Because the weights are based on NHS labor costs, the index better reflects the dynamics of wages serving as inputs into NHS production than commonly-cited wage measures like AHE and ECI. And because the weights are fixed to 2019 levels, the index is less sensitive to compositional shifts than unadjusted average measures like AHE. Figure 2 plots the yearly percent change in the NHS wage series for production and nonsupervisory workers and NHS inflation.
.@generaltheorist notes that during the pandemic for every additional $1T in currency and deposits, American households saw $6T in non-monetary wealth driven by equities and real estate.
Household net worth expanded by USD34 trillion from end-2019 through end-2021, an increase of >150% of end-2019 GDP in only 2 years. This wealth increase was mainly due to the increase in financial and non-financial assets (housing). The chart below shows the change in the value of outstanding assets held by households for select items from end-2019. Currency and deposits held by households began the sharp increase in the first quarter of 2020, during the initial lockdowns, and increased by about USD4½ trillion in total. The increase in equity and real estate assets, mainly due to valuation adjustments, followed—and in value terms was a much larger influence on household net worth. At its peak, equity and investment fund shares, which fell in value by USD6 trillion by end-March 2020, increased nearly USD18 trillion by end-2021 on end-2019, or USD24 trillion peak-to-trough. The declines experienced last year during the interest rate normalization have weighed on such wealth since, but the levels remained above pre-pandemic norms. Real estate assets continued to increase in value still in 2022Q3, though at a diminishing pace as housing feels the strain of higher rates. Still, nearly USD13 trillion was added to household wealth through real estate since end-2019. Put another way, at its peak, every additional USD1 trillion in monetary wealth during the pandemic came to be reflected in roughly USD6 trillion in non-monetary wealth, mainly equities and housing.
Evidence from Norway shows internet expansion reduced friction associated with finding a job and reduced the steady state unemployment rate by 14%. @AndreasKostol @nberpubs
We found that the internet led more firms to recruit online. It further caused a 9% decline in the duration of posted vacancies and 13% fewer unsuccessful hiring attempts. Next, we showed that the expansion increased job finding rates by 2.4% and starting wages by 6% among the unemployed. However, we found no evidence of changes in job-to-job mobility or wage growth for the employed. Through the lens of the calibrated model, we found that search technology is the primary mechanism behind the quasi-experimental evidence. Our calculations indicated that the broadband internet expansion may have caused a 14% decline in the steady-state unemployment rate. Our paper sheds light on two recent macroeconomic trends. First, the falling rates of worker mobility in the US have fueled a concern about the causes and consequences of declining labor market mobility. Our results suggest that online job search and recruitment may have improved match quality by providing more information about potential jobs and better tools to screen potential candidates. In turn, this improvement may have reduced the need to switch employers in search for a better match – consistent with a more optimistic view of recent trends in job mobility. Second, our evidence helps explain the inward shift in the Beveridge curve observed in Norway and in other countries from the 1990s to the early 2000s. Our evidence suggests that without the near-universal internet adoption rates, the unemployment rate after the Great Recession would have reached even higher levels.
.@M_C_Klein notes that China has been pursuing successful import substitution for some time. As of 2018 (the last year with comprehensive data), China could domestically produce 81% of critical manufactured goods, up from 67% in 2004.
As of 2018—the last year for which we have comprehensive data—Chinese production of critical manufactured goods is now sufficient to cover more than 81% of its domestic demand, up from 67% in 2004. The Chinese shift towards self-sufficiency since 2004 was unmatched by any of the other major economies, developing or advanced. China’s transition was achieved via forced technology transfer (including theft), massive subsidies for domestic producers, and a range of (often hidden) restrictions on imports. Combined, China’s investment slowdown and its push for self-sufficiency have driven down total trade (exports plus imports) from nearly 65% of Chinese GDP in 2007 to less than 40% as of 2022.
.@TheEconomist reports that between mid-2020-2022 America’s lower earners saw cumulative inflation of 13.5% whereas middle earners saw 15.5%. The difference was largely driven by car prices and fuel expenditures. @XJaravel
Middle-income earners, not the poorest, appear to have borne the brunt of America’s current bout of inflation. Research by Xavier Jaravel of the London School of Economics has yielded a distinctive shape—an inverted-U curve—that illustrates the distributional effects of inflation in America from mid-2020 to mid-2022. For the lowest earners, inflation was about 13.5%. For those in the middle of the spectrum, inflation was closer to 15.5%. The wealthiest faced inflation of about 14%. Since 2020 nominal wages have increased at an average annual rate of about 4.2% for Americans as a whole. The lowest-earning quartile, however, has seen the biggest gains, with their wages up by 5.3% on average during the same period.
The 13M Americans working in the manufacturing sector in January surpassed the peak set during the previous business cycle in February of 2020, a first since the 1970s. This growth has been accompanied by a decline in real output per hour worked. @foxjust
For the first time since the late 1970s, US employment in manufacturing has surpassed the peak set during the previous business cycle. This happened in May 2022, according to the revised 2022 payroll jobs data released last week by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. As of January 2023, the sector employed just short of 13 million Americans on a seasonally adjusted basis, the biggest number since November 2008. The huge manufacturing productivity gains of the 1990s and 2000s appear to have given way to a situation where producing more stuff actually requires hiring more workers.
Michael Spence and Belinda Azenui note that labor productivity between the tradable and non-tradable sectors started to diverge in 1998, and by 2021 per-employee value-added in tradable sectors was nearly double the non-tradable sectors. @ProSyn
Value-added per employee is a measure of labor productivity. In America’s tradable sector, it has risen steadily over the last two decades in both manufacturing and services, reaching roughly $185,000 (in chained 2012 dollars) in 2021. Over the same period, productivity growth in this sector averaged nearly 3%. The non-tradable economy [net government] is just 0.57% per annum over the last 20 years. This reflects below-average productivity levels and, in most cases, low-to-moderate productivity growth in the large-employment sectors. There was not always a large gap between the tradable and non-tradable sectors. On the contrary, as the chart shows, labor productivity was about $100,000 across the economy in 1998. But by 2021, after more than two decades of steady divergence, per-employee value-added in the tradable sector was nearly double the level in the non-tradable sector.
The share of single men who are looking for a relationship and/or casual dates has declined from 61% in 2019 to 50% in 2022. 32% of American men and 28% of women were single in 2022. @pewresearch
The percentage of single Americans who are looking for a relationship or casual dates is lower than in 2019, especially among men. Some 42% of single Americans say they’re looking for a committed romantic relationship and/or casual dates, down from 49% in 2019 (but similar to the proportion found in the Center’s February 2022 survey). This drop is largely driven by single men, who are now 11 percentage points less likely than in 2019 to say they are looking for a committed relationship and/or casual dates (50% in July 2022, down from 61% in 2019). During the same time frame, there has been no significant change in the share of single women who are looking for a relationship or casual dates: 35% said this in 2022, compared with 38% in 2019.
A new @NBERpubs study finds that in 2020 ~ 1/3 of children between the ages of 18-34 lived with their parents, but found no clear evidence that this impacts parents’ current or future labor market choices, or their wealth, health, or life satisfaction.
The share of U.S. adult children living with their parents has increased since the 1960s. Figure 1 shows that in 2020, approximately one-third of children between ages 18 and 34 lived with their parents, with men and 18-24 year-olds, respectively, more likely to co-reside than women and 25-34 year-olds. We examine the relationship between adult children returning home and parental retirement outcomes using data from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), a nationally representative panel of individuals over the age of 50 and their spouses; the HRS also tracks children of respondents. Our child-level analysis suggests that a boomerang event is likely associated with negative shocks to a child’s marriage, income, and employment. The event study analysis suggests that many of these shocks are temporary, and correspondingly most boomerang events are transitory. At the parent level, we find no clear, statistically significant association between boomerang children and parental health, wealth, probability of working, hours worked, or well-being. However, we do find an increase in the self-reported probability of working full-time after age 65. That increase is concentrated among men, those under the age of 62, and those in the top half of the initial wealth distribution. Overall, our results provide evidence that parents may delay their anticipated retirement when children return home.
Week of January 30, 2023
Public firms’ returns on the book value of assets are down ~ 50% from 1980 and private firms’ returns have doubled. @EconTraina @ASollaci @CarterDavisFin
Why have US aggregate profit rates increased while financial market rates decreased since 1980? We propose a mismatch hypothesis: Profit rates in the national accounts track the return on capital for all firms, while financial market rates track the cost of capital for public firms only. We show public-firm profit rates halved since 1980, matching trends in financial markets and suggesting low market power. Mechanically, this residual private capital return series shows private capital returns had to have increased substantially to account for this secular break between aggregate and public firm profitability. The degree of this shift is significant: Private firms’ profit rates are on average 10% higher than public firms’ in the post-2000 period. Nonfinancial domestic private-firm profit rates doubled, suggesting high market power or risk. Size and sector differences cannot explain the divergence, though intangible-intensity might. Our results indicate substantial biases in extrapolating public-firm trends to the aggregate economy.
Matt Rognlie @ludwigstraub @a_auclert argue that it will take up to five years for excess savings to work though the systems as individuals with higher marginal propensity to consume generate income for individuals with higher savings rates.
Deficit-financed fiscal transfers generate excess savings. One person’s spending is another person’s income. As we show, taking this fact into account implies that excess savings from debt-financed transfers have much longer-lasting effects than a naive calculation would suggest. In a closed economy, unless the government pays down the debt used to finance the transfers, excess savings do not go away as households spend them down. Instead, the effect of excess savings on aggregate demand slowly dissipates as they “trickle up” the wealth distribution to agents with lower MPCs. Tight monetary policy speeds up this process, but this effect is likely to be quantitatively modest. The partial equilibrium scenario summarizes the conventional wisdom according to which the effect of excess savings will dissipate in a few quarters. By contrast, our benchmark scenario suggests that these effects will stick around for roughly 5 years.
.@M_C_Klein argues that the decline in excess savings has largely been driven by high-income households. In 2022, these households had above-normal spending, low interest and dividend receipts, and high tax payments for 2021 capital gains.
Americans liquidated more than $1Tof “excess” savings in 2022, eliminating more than half of the surplus accumulated since the pandemic began. If the current pace continues, the entire stock will vanish by the end of this year. The great dissaving of 2022 can be explained by the (relative) misfortunes afflicting high earners as society normalized. First, dividend and interest income were unusually weak. U.S. post-tax corporate profits in 2022 were roughly 40% higher than in 2019, but dividend payments to shareholders were up just 14% because companies opted for buybacks. Meanwhile, the combination of soaring asset values and the relative preference for buybacks has meant that wealthy Americans owed substantial taxes in 2022 based on 2021 capital gains. Personal income tax payments, which include capital gains, are currently running 26% above what would be expected based on the 2018-2019 trend. Employee pay is 2% above trend while payroll tax receipts are about 0.5% above trend.
.@JohnHCochrane argues that our existing tax system of “high statutory rates with a Swiss cheese of exemptions, immense cost, unfairness and distortion” should be replaced; he thinks a consumption tax would be more transparent and efficient.
Our income and estate tax system is broken. It has high statutory rates with a Swiss cheese of exemptions, immense cost, unfairness, and distortion. A consumption tax, with none of the absurd complexity of our current taxes, is the answer. It funds the government with the least economic distortion. A consumption tax need not be regressive. It’s easy enough to exempt the first few thousand dollars of consumption or add to the rebate. Taxes overall must finance what the government spends. Collecting it in one tax rather than lots of smaller taxes doesn’t change the overall rate. It’s better for voters to see how much the government takes.
The @economist notes that “almost all” recent AI breakthroughs have come from large firms, in large part due to their access to the computing power required to develop state-of-the-art AI models.
Almost all recent breakthroughs in artificial intelligence globally have come from large companies, in large part because they have the computing power. Amazon, whose AI powers its Alexa voice assistant, and Meta, which made waves recently when one of its models beat human players at “Diplomacy,” a strategy board game, respectively produce two-thirds and four-fifths as much AI research as Stanford University, a bastion of computer-science eggheads. Alphabet and Microsoft churn out considerably more, and that is not including DeepMind, Google Research’s sister lab which the parent company acquired in 2014, and the Microsoft-affiliated OpenAI.
.@mattsclancy highlights evidence that major productivity gains in research result from allowing scientists & researchers to cluster with other highly skilled inventors. Allowing more high-skilled immigration could boost per capita GDP growth rates by 9%.
Moving to the USA raises citations to math publications four-fold, or 2.5-fold if you restrict attention to people who become a math academic at home or abroad. Comparing New Zealander migrants who return or stay abroad - the ones who stay abroad get up to four times as many citations as those who return. PhD students who stay in the USA get 4-6 times as many citations to their work as their peers in the same program who end up moving back to a country with GDP per capita outside the top 25%. That’s a pretty consistently large effect. And we get similar kinds of results when we look at other proxies for scientific achievement, whether it’s counting publications, patents, or becoming an invited speaker to the International Congress of Mathematicians. A model of the innovation/immigration/trade economy between the US and EU...implies if the USA doubled the H-1B visa cap from 65,000 to 130,000, it would raise the real GDP per capita growth rate in each region by 9% in the long run.
Database
Week of January 2, 2023
J.P. Morgan estimates consumers still have $900B of excess savings, down from a peak of $2.1B in August 2021.
From March 2020 to August 2021, consumers amassed a peak $2.1 trillion in excess savings relative to the pre-pandemic trend. Since August 2021, consumers have drawn down on these excess savings. Household debt payments were 9.8% of disposable personal income in Q4 ’22 vs. a peak of 13.2% in Q4 of ’04.
.@mfariacastro at @stlouisfed estimates that the decline in asset values in 2022 drove 170,000 workers aged 51-65 back into the labor force. This represents 16% of the increase in LFP from Jan through Oct 2022.
The figure above plots the estimated average change in net worth per head of household age category during 2022. People between the ages of 55 and 74 lost, on average, over $100,000 in net worth due to falling asset returns between January and October 2022. This partly reverses some of the net worth gains in 2020-21, which were particularly high for these age groups. This is explained by the high exposure (in absolute terms) of people in these age groups to asset classes such as stocks and bonds, which performed reasonably well in 2020-21 but posted significant negative returns during 2022. Focusing on only people between the ages of 51 and 65, whose decision to participate in the labor force tends to be more sensitive to wealth effects, we find that the decline in asset values may have caused an extra 170,000 people to return to the labor force. This corresponds to an increase in the LFP rate of 0.06 percentage points, or about 16% of the total increase observed through October 2022.
The American college workforce is 5% larger than in Feb 2022, whereas the high school workforce is 4% smaller. This has likely contributed to the decrease in earnings inequality in the post-pandemic period. @Greg_Ip
In the decades before the pandemic, the wages of lower-paid, less skilled hourly employees steadily lost ground to those of skilled workers, college graduates, managers, and professionals. In the two years since, those trends have sharply reversed. We don’t know if this narrowing in inequality will last. Perhaps it is a function of labor shortages that, like semiconductor shortages, will disappear as the pandemic recedes. Maybe it is the result of a tight labor market whose days are numbered as the Federal Reserve seeks to cool the economy. Some of this was catalyzed by the pandemic, which shrank the supply of people willing to do traditionally low-paid work. Many dropped out of the labor force, retired, or died from Covid-19. The college-educated labor force was 5% larger last month than in February 2020; the high school-educated and high school dropout labor force is 4% smaller. (Data between the two periods isn’t strictly comparable.)
Bank of America notes evidence of reshoring to Mexico at the expense of China with imports of Mexican low-tech goods such as plastics and textiles up ~60% relative to pre-pandemic levels.
Another big winner in the U.S.-China trade war could be Mexico. It has lower wages than China, an established manufacturing sector anchored by the automotive industry, and the perfect geographic position for serving the U.S. market—particularly since the rise of videoconferencing, which has increased the importance of being in the same time zone. Analysts at Bank of America already see some evidence that this is happening, with U.S. imports of Mexican manufactured goods roughly 60% higher than before the pandemic as of October. Interestingly, Mexico has gained share of U.S. imports in some low-tech industrial sectors such as plastics and textiles, while China has lost share.
An analysis by @jburnmurdoch suggests millennials in the US and UK are breaking a historical pattern of becoming more conservative in their voting behavior as they age.
By my calculations, members of Britain’s “silent generation”, born between 1928 and 1945, were five percentage points less conservative than the national average at age 35, but around five points more conservative by age 70. The “baby boomer” generation traced the same path, and “Gen X”, born between 1965 and 1980, are now following suit. Millennials — born between 1981 and 1996 — started out on the same trajectory, but then something changed. The most likely explanation is a cohort effect — that millennials have developed different values to previous generations. This is borne out by US survey data showing that, having reached political maturity in the aftermath of the global financial crisis, millennials are tacking much further to the left on economics than previous generations did, favoring greater redistribution from rich to poor.
Independent analyst @JosephPolitano notes that the primary driver of capacity under-utilization for American manufacturing firms has shifted from insufficient orders to insufficient supply of labor and materials.
American manufacturing firms are also citing materials and labor shortages as major constraints to production at the highest levels in decades. Everywhere you look, supply chains seem to be in disarray—and demand seems to be off the charts.
According to recent surveys, recently laid-off tech workers are quickly finding new employment with 40% accepting a new position within 30 days. @WSJ
About 79% of workers recently hired after a tech-company layoff or termination landed their new job within three months of starting their search, according to a ZipRecruiter survey of new hires. That was just below the 83% share of all laid-off workers who were re-employed in the same time frame. Nearly four in ten previously laid-off tech workers found jobs less than a month after they began searching, ZipRecruiter found in the survey.
cording to @jmhorp Millennials are keeping pace with Baby Boomers and Gen X in terms of generational wealth per capita.
Millennials are roughly equal in wealth per capita to Baby Boomers and Gen X at the same age. Gen X is currently much wealthier than Boomers were at the same age: about $100,000 per capita or 18% greater. Wealth has declined significantly in 2022, but the hasn’t affected Millennials very much since they have very little wealth in the stock market (real estate is by far their largest wealth category.)
According to data from Insider Intelligence, Google and Facebook’s share of digital advertising was 48.4% in 2022, and is expected to decline to 44.9% in 2023, as Amazon, TikTok, and digital streamers gain share. @WSJ
For the first time in nearly a decade, the two largest players in online advertising are no longer raking in the majority of U.S. digital-ad dollars, a decline that industry insiders expect to continue in years to come. Alphabet Inc.’s; Google and Facebook parent Meta Platforms Inc. accounted for a combined 48.4% of U.S. digital-ad spending in 2022, according to estimates from research firm Insider Intelligence Inc. Their combined U.S. market share hadn’t been under 50% since 2014, said Insider Intelligence, which expects that number to drop to 44.9% this year.
Americans are drinking at elevated levels in the aftermath of the pandemic with inflation-adjusted spending up 15% in 2022 vs. just before the pandemic. @foxjust
There is clear evidence that more people are drinking too much. Deaths from alcohol-induced causes rose from 39,043 in 2019 to 54,258 in 2021, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the population-adjusted death rate is now more than double what it was in the 2000s. Provisional data also show an encouraging decline in alcohol-induced deaths in the first half of 2022, although that trend could change as final numbers become available. Even after the big increases of the past couple of years, US alcohol consumption likely still lags that of many affluent countries, especially in Europe. And yes, Americans drank lots more back in the 1970s — not to mention the 1830s, when estimated per-capita consumption was nearly three times what it was in 2020.
.@FiveThirtyEight analyst @geoffreyvs finds that Fetterman’s margin of victory was provided by non-college white voters: Fetterman polled 7pp better than Biden in counties dominated by non-college whites.
John Fetterman bettered Biden’s margin across almost the entire state on his way to defeating Republican Mehmet Oz by about 5 percentage points, his largest improvements over Biden tended to be in red-leaning counties with higher shares of white residents without a college degree. In counties with a population that’s at least 60 percent white without a college degree — which together produced about 36 percent of the state’s 2022 vote — Fetterman’s margin was 7 points better than Biden’s, on average, compared with just 3 points better elsewhere.
During Biden’s first two years in office, he has approved at least $4.8T of new borrowing according to @BudgetHawks.
Since January 2021, the Biden Administration has enacted policies through legislation and executive actions that will add more than $4.8 trillion to budget deficits between 2021 and 2031. The $4.8 trillion is the net result of roughly $4.6 trillion of new spending, about $500 billion of tax cuts and tax breaks, and $700 billion of additional interest costs that are partially offset by $400 billion of spending cuts and $600 billion of revenue increases.
.@JohnHCochrane reviews Phil Gramm, Robert Ekelund and John Early book and highlights their big finding, “The effective marginal tax rate in the lowest three quintiles is effectively 100%. Earn a dollar and lose a dollar of benefits. Why work?”
Why has work collapsed in the bottom decile? Here we might have a big debate. $11.76 per hour (2017) isn't a lot. But the previous graphs certainly contain a suggestion worth pursuing: The effective marginal tax rate in the lowest three quintiles is effectively 100%. Earn a dollar and lose a dollar of benefits. Why work? Gramm Ekelund and Early are careful, and don't make any causal assertions here. They don't really even stress the fact popping from the table as much as I have. But the fact is a fact, a nearly 100% tax rate + an income effect isn't a positive for labor supply, and the amount of work in lower quintiles has plummeted. This is a book about facing facts and this one is undeniable.
Week of December 19, 2022
A new BLS data series “New Tenant Repeat Rent Index” suggests that the highest housing inflation is behind us, and other indexes should see price deceleration soon, according to @JosephPolitano.
Researchers at the BLS and Cleveland Fed released a data series today that might be the single most important new inflation indicator. The New Tenant Repeat Rent Index uses the same microdata that goes into the official Consumer Price Index to select only samples with rental turnover and to assign price shifts to when they happened, not when the units were surveyed. The New Tenant Repeat Rent Index, therefore, leads official inflation data in the CPI by 1 year. The good news is that the New Tenant Repeat Rent Index suggests that the worst of housing inflation is likely behind us, and price decelerations should pass through to official inflation data soon. Critically, New Tenant Repeat Rent index also shows lower overall price growth than private data.
First generation immigrants make up 16% of American inventors, but are responsible for 23% of total innovation output. Including the spillover effects on native born collaborators, they drive 36% of aggregate innovation. @bibipousada @shaibrn @rebeccardiamond
We link patent records to a database containing the first five digits of more than 230mm of Social Security Numbers (SSN). By combining this part of the SSN together with year of birth, we identify whether individuals are immigrants based on the age at which their Social Security Number is assigned. We find immigrants represent 16% of all US inventors, but produced 23% of total innovation output, as measured by number of patents, patent citations, and the economic value of these patents. Immigrant inventors are more likely to rely on foreign technologies, to collaborate with foreign inventors, and to be cited in foreign markets, thus contributing to the importation and diffusion of ideas across borders. A simple decomposition illustrates that immigrants are responsible for 36% of aggregate innovation, two-thirds of which is due to their innovation externalities on their native-born collaborators.
.@mjmauboussin shows capital expenditures net of depreciation as a percentage of sales peaked in 1988 at 6.9%. Over the past decade it has averaged 1.8% and fell to 0.5% in 2020 during the pandemic.
Exhibit 25 shows capital expenditures minus depreciation for the population we studied. Using this measure, investment as a percentage of sales peaked in 1988 at 6.9% and bottomed in 2020 at 0.5 percent of sales. The average of the past decade was 1.8%. The two substantial limitations to using depreciation as a proxy for maintenance capital expenditures include inflation and the risk of technological obsolescence. In periods of rising prices (such as 2022), the capital expenditures required to replace new equipment will exceed depreciation because new expenditures reflect inflation whereas depreciation is based on historical costs. Technological obsolescence introduces the likelihood that depreciation overestimates an asset’s useful life.
Week of December 12, 2022
Citing CBO data, @MichaelRStrain finds that market income for the median household grew by 26% from 1990 through 2019 after adjusting for inflation. Including transfer payments and federal taxes, real median household income grew 55%. @AEIecon
Median household income from market activities – labor, business, and capital income, as well as retirement income from past services – was not stagnant from 1990 to 2019. Instead, after adjusting for inflation, it grew by 26%. This is in line with wage growth. By my calculations using Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data, inflation-adjusted average wages for nonsupervisory workers grew by around one-third over this period. After factoring in social insurance benefits (from Social Security and unemployment insurance, for example), government safety-net benefits (such as food stamps), and federal taxes, the CBO finds that median household income increased by 55% from 1990 to 2019, which is significantly faster than wage growth and certainly not stagnate. The bottom 20% of households enjoyed even greater gains, with market income growth of 51% and after-tax-and-transfer income growth of 74%.
.@swinshi notes that @JacobBastian25’s latest research underestimates the disemployment effects of an enhanced Child Tax Credit. Scott view of the disemployment effects support Bruce Myers and @kefincorinth CTC estimates @UChicago. @aei
In his reconciliation of his own results with those of the Chicago team, Bastian misattributes something on the order of 200,000 of the one-million-parent difference in predicted disemployment to married parents rather than to low-income single mothers. Relative to the Chicago team, he underestimates the disemployment of low-income single mothers by a similar amount. The evidence remains consistent with the Chicago team’s claims: a permanent expansion of the CTC that resembles the temporary child allowance created in 2021 could reduce employment among single mothers by about one million, an effect that would go a long way toward reversing the employment gains among single mothers since the policy reforms of the mid-1990s.
.@johnauthers reports that we may have seen a trough in global liquidity, according to data from Crossborder Capital.
The above chart by Michael Howell of Crossborder Capital shows estimates of global new liquidity. The lines indicate the three-month annualized % growth in the monetary base. Globally [red line], growth in liquidity has ticked up very slightly after dropping to its lowest level since the global financial crisis. In the major G10 economies [grey and yellow], there is a pickup from outright negative growth that has been helped by the startling fall in the US dollar in recent weeks. As many countries use dollar financing, this has the effect of easing conditions everywhere. Last week’s balance sheet data from major central banks show policy liquidity shrinking at 5.3% in local currency terms [yellow] but rising by 2.7% in US dollar terms [grey.] Thus, it is possible that a pivot away from tighter money is already under way.
According to research published by @NBER, higher productivity growth in 1989-2017 “is more than sufficient to explain the greater wage growth that more educated workers enjoyed as compared with less educated workers.”
U.S. regression results show that there is a high implicit correlation between the rise over time of wages by skill level and the rise of productivity by skill level. Productivity in the high-education industries [orange] grew by over .34 log points between 1989 and 2017, while productivity in the low-education industries [blue] grew only .20 log points during that same 30-year period. Wages in high-education industries grew by .26 log points while those in the low-education industries half grew by .24 log points during the 1989-2017 period. It’s clear that the difference in productivity growth between the two skill groups is more pronounced than the difference in wages. This simple comparison suggests that differences in productivity growth rates between skill groups is more than sufficient to explain the greater wage growth that more educated workers enjoyed as compared with less educated workers.