Views on the minimum wage show economics to be an inexact science

.The hallmark of a science is not just having refutable hypotheses, but also changing its view when data shows the theory is wrong. Economics is often accused of not being a science. A good test case to see if that is true is the minimum wage. Basic economic theory suggests if you fix wages at above their level in the market, employment will fall as less workers are employed. However a number of empirical studies, the most well known of which was written by Card and Krueger in 1994, have suggested that employment shows no noticeable decline when a minimum wage is imposed or modestly increased. My reading is that the most convincing studies do show this result, but not all do, so the picture is not completely clear.

This illustrates a problem for economics (and all social sciences) that outsides often fail to appreciate. Measurements and econometric studies are often not conclusive, and even in the case of austerity you can find one or two empirical studies which says something different to all the rest. As a result, it is more difficult to use data to show a hypothesis is conclusively wrong in the way the natural sciences can. My own view is that the balance of studies clearly shows a modest minimum wage has no noticeable impact on employment, but others would disagree.

Here is a question from the IGM survey.of around 50 top US economists on the minimum wage

Academic economists appear evenly divided, and few hold a strong opinion on the issue. A similar survey of UK economists, asked about the 2016 increase in the minimum wage, was also divided but lent more towards no effect. In contrast, most German economists appear to have been opposed to the recent introduction of a minimum wage.

If you were cynical you might say that all this shows is that the views of economists just reflect their political opinions, and I would indeed expect there would be a clear correlation to support that with the minimum wage. However when either theory or evidence are pretty clear, economists do not divide by political opinion. The same survey in 2012 and 2014 showed economists largely agreeing that the Obama stimulus reduced unemployment and was beneficial, even though the political right was strongly opposed to it. The reason is that economic theory and nearly all evidence shows that fiscal expansion when interest rates are stuck at their lower bound is expansionary.

Equally standard microeconomic theory is just as clear that the minimum wage will reduce employment, and I suspect that had this survey been done in the early 1990s most academics would have agreed with this, whatever their political persuasion. What has changed is the evidence. This example clearly shows a good number of academics responding to empirical results that conflict with standard theory.

Furthermore some economists have done what good scientists should do and produced new theories which can explain the empirical results that the minimum wage does not reduce employment. In that sense economists have been behaving as a science should. But because there are some contrary studies, that allows two things that distinguish economics from physical sciences. The first thing is a temptation to hold on to basic theory even though the balance of evidence is against it, something that is not totally absent in the physical science either (Kuhn, Lakatos etc). The second is to allow ideological influences to help decide what should be a scientific judgement. These are the senses in which economics is an inexact science.

For those interested in economic methodology, and excellent place to start is here, the title of which I am abusing in this post. However it is also worth reading this for sources on the new 'empirical turn' in economics. On the impact of ideology on economics a great place to start is this thread from Beatrice Cherrier. On the introduction and history of the minimum wage in the UK, including initial political resistance to it, see here.

Minimum Wages, Monopsony and Towns

Alan Manning has a very good article in Foreign Affairs about minimum wages. The impact of minimum wages on employment is a politically charged issue in economics, and so is similar in that sense to most of macro. With minimum wages, the battlefield is empirical. I often think of this battle when people accuse mainstream economics as being hopelessly neoliberal: it was mainstream economists (David Card and Alan Krueger) who first showed that the data did not conform to what Manning describes as Econ 101 economics, and other mainstream economists who have continued to find this result.

I think two conclusions can be drawn from the many studies that followed Card and Krueger. First, empirical work clearly shows plenty of examples where imposing or increasing minimum wages did not reduce employment. However few would argue that result will hold in all situations for all levels of the minimum wage. That is why, before George Osborne raised it, the UK minimum wage level was set by the Low Pay Commission, who tried to assess these issues. Perhaps the Commission became too cautious, but no doubt we will see more studies on the Osborne increase in due course.In my view another key issue future studies should address is whether increasing nominal wages has any impact on productivity.

Manning also makes a point about the limitations of minimum wages as a tool to deal with poverty. He points out that as “an hourly rate, the minimum wage on its own reveals little about the household income of those who earn it.” He suggests that minimum wages work well alongside earned income tax credits. Minimum wages can help prevent employers capturing part of tax credits by cutting wages in the knowledge that the state would make up the difference.

There are two main reasons why Econ 101 (first year undergraduate) economics gives the wrong answer on minimum wages: search and monopsony. Take search first. In the Econ 101 world no one celebrates getting a new job or worries about losing an existing one. One reason most people do both is search: it takes time and effort to find a new job. Equally it costs the firm money to recruit new people. That creates a zone around the Econ 101 wage within which variations in wages would not lead to job losses or people leaving. Where the actual wage is within that zone will depend on bargaining power between the worker and firm.

Monopsony is the situation where alternative employment opportunities for workers are scarce, which gives the firm the power to set wages below the perfectly competitive level of the standard Econ 101 model. (There is an element of search here too: the costs of moving location. These are much larger than the costs of looking for a job in your own area, particularly for families.) The classic example of monopsony is the town where there is just one major employer.

I suspect many labour economists regard monopsony in the labour market as something of a special case. That perception may need updating, argues Marshall Steinbaum here, drawing on recent work by him and coauthors for the US. They find “that most labor markets (as defined by occupation and geography) are very concentrated [few firms], and that this concentration has a robust negative impact on posted wages for job openings.” That is exactly what you would expect from monopsony: the fewer firms there are in a location, the less often vacancies occur, so the less these firms when suppressing wages have to worry that workers will quit.

The article considers a number of policy implications stemming from widespread monopsony that are worth reading. This could include, in the UK, improving rail communications into cities besides London. The one directly relevant to this post is that these results may help explain why minimum wages do not reduce employment. In the absence of minimum wages, relatively poorly performing firms may be able to shift the impact of poor performance from profits to wages. The minimum wage stops that happening. 

If monopsony is prevalent in large towns but not big cities, I couldn't help wondering if this might have something to do with the difference between towns and cities in the Brexit vote I mentioned in my last post. Support for Trump is also strong in the rural parts of the US, which is where Steinbaum et al find monopsony is prevalent. What this monopsony study suggests is that working conditions within firms are likely to be worse in towns than in cities. What impact might that have on voters? One response to worker exploitation in towns is for people to leave, as they do. For those who stay, an overriding concern might be the survival of firms within the town. This in turn could have an important impact on voter attitudes.  

Underestimating the impact of austerity

There have been many ideas put forward to explain the low growth in UK productivity, but among mainstream accounts the impact of austerity is not usually high up on the list of possibilities. I have talked before about what I call an ‘innovations gap’, and how the UK is currently suffering a particularly large innovations gap. The idea of an innovations gap can link inadequate demand, like austerity, to low productivity growth.

Let me use a very simple example to explain how an innovations gap can arise after a deep recession followed by austerity. Assume that improvements in technology and production techniques are constantly taking place, or being learnt from other firms/countries, but they need new investment to put them in place. This is what economists call embodied technical progress.

Imagine a firm where demand is not increasing. Will that firm invest to become more productive? Only if the additional profits it can make as a result of investing (suitably discounted) is greater than the cost of the investment. For this firm we therefore need quite a big innovation gap before it is worth its while to undertake investment and before its productivity increases.

Now imagine that demand increases. The firm now has to undertake some additional investment to increase its output. It makes sense to invest in techniques that embody the latest technology. The increase in demand leads to both higher investment (what economists call the ‘accelerator’) and higher productivity.

In a normal recovery from a recession, demand recovers rapidly (growth easily exceeds past trends), leading firms to invest in the latest technology. Any innovations gap that might have opened up in the recession is quickly closed. In contrast, a very slow recovery caused by austerity will reduce the need for investment, allowing a large innovations gap to open up.

This idea fits in with some recent work which suggests that productivity growth in ‘frontier’ firms (firms that already have relatively high productivity) has not slowed, and a gap has opened up between these frontier firms and laggards. (See also here.) This would make sense if the frontier firms are growing (because they are the most productive) but the laggard firms are not. Growing firms need to invest to expand, but stagnant firms are not expanding.

The same model could also suggest how wage led productivity growth could occur (see Ben Chu here for example). As most innovations are likely to be labour saving, then higher wages can increase the profits that come from any particular investment, without necessarily increasing the cost of that investment. So an increase in wages caused by an increase in the minimum wage, for example, could increase investment and therefore increase productivity. The other side of that coin is that the period of stagnant wage growth we have had since the recession provided no incentive for firms to invest in higher productivity techniques.

I doubt that this story explains more than a part of the UK’s productivity gap. In the UK investment in plant and machinery fell sharply in the recession, and has not yet recovered to pre-recession levels, but its decline is unlikely to be enough to explain a productivity standstill. (For an account of some other key factors that could explain the UK productivity puzzle, see here.) But if it explains even a little, it makes austerity a lot more costly.

One way of describing what I’m saying is that austerity influences supply as well as demand. You could say austerity ignores the accelerator as well as the multiplier, which is cute but does not capture the idea of embodied technical progress which is crucial to this argument. It is why it is always best to run a high pressure economy (see Martin Sandbu here who links to an interview between Jared Bernstein and Josh Bivens).

As I explain here, I do not use austerity as just another name for any fiscal consolidation, or fiscal consolidation involving cuts to spending. Fiscal consolidation need not reduce output for the aggregate economy if monetary policy is able to offset its impact. But if interest rates are at their lower bound, as they are once again in the UK [1], fiscal consolidation will reduce output and lead to another needless waste of resources. Since Brexit we have a second period of UK austerity. In assessing how costly this will be, we need to look not just at whether it creates a negative output gap, but also how it creates an innovations gap that reduces productivity.

[1] We know this, because the Bank is increasing the amount of QE.

German macroeconomics revisited

At the end of April George Bratsiotis and David Cobham organised a conference with the provocative title “German macro: how it's different and why that matters” which I unfortunately was not able to attend. Six of the papers presented, plus some additional papers on related themes, are published here. The papers by Peter Bofinger and Michael Burda are related to earlier work by both authors that I have discussed in earlier posts here and here.

Many of the themes in these papers have been briefly discussed in past posts. Peter Bofinger notes that the macro taught in German universities is little different from that taught elsewhere, but stresses the prevailing influence of Ordoliberalism and the ideas of Walter Eucken. Michael Burda emphasises the role of German self-interest in influencing the policy positions of German macroeconomists. As I note here, it is often difficult to distinguish between the relative importance of ideas and self interest.

This is particularly true when ideas and self interest reinforce each other. According to Bofinger, Ordoliberalism reacted to the demand problem identified by Keynes by stressing the importance of wage flexibility and sound money. Germany’s distinctive wage bargaining structure allows an unusual degree of flexibility. In the context of a fixed rate system or monetary union where other countries cannot respond in kind, this does indeed allow a way out of demand deficiency as we saw in the early years of the Euro. As a result, virtually the only country to survive to Eurozone recession largely unscathed was Germany.

I hope it does not need spelling out that this route out of demand deficiency only works by taking demand from other countries. [1] If Germany had its own currency and a floating exchange rate, any fall in domestic prices would be offset by an exchange rate appreciation. Luckily for Germany its neighbours, perhaps attracted by its ability to keep inflation low, have been eager join fixed rate systems or monetary unions where the wage cutting trick will work (see the book by Yanis Varoufakis reviewed here for example).

The only points I would add is that this unusual economic outlook is not confined to macroeconomics, and that it depends to some extent on a degree of insularity from international mainstream discussions of economic policy. It is hard to imagine a reputable UK or US research institute talking about the minimum wage and saying “minimum wages have time and again been shown to help some workers earn more at the cost of the low-skilled losing their jobs”, as if the work of Card and Krueger had never happened. I have sometimes wondered whether in Germany business has an influence on the economic debate that in the UK and US has been replaced by the influence of finance, but that at the moment is purely a speculative idea.

[1] An important point to note here is that if you have a target for the level (or path) of the money stock, then wage and price flexibility might get a closed economy out of recession if it was successful in raising inflation expectations. However the ECB has an inflation target and not anything like a price level target.

Economic credibility

The UK’s Labour leadership election has become a two horse race: Jeremy Corbyn on the left, versus ABC. I must admit that it took me a bit of time before I realised who ABC was - it is Anyone But Corbyn. It is quite an achievement not only to become the candidate everyone is talking about, but also to be able to define your opponent as well. The last time I can remember that happening was - well, the 2015 UK general election maybe!

Anyway, a constant refrain of ABC is that Labour can only win if it has economic credibility, with the implication that Corbyn’s economics are a bit wacky. As I argued here, some of Corbyn’s macro proposals are misconceived, and if the implication of them is that the Bank of England would lose its independence then they also go against the view of most mainstream macroeconomists. That, by the way, is why I did not sign this letter, even though I agree wholeheartedly that “his opposition to austerity is actually mainstream economics”.

In the last paragraph I played a little trick that I hope most of you would not have noticed, and that is to equate ‘economic credibility’ with ‘mainstream (macro)economics’. If that seems reasonable to you, think about the following. In 2009, most of the world was following mainstream economics in undertaking a fiscal stimulus to combat the impact of the financial crisis. But in the UK a certain politician decided to ignore ‘economic credibility’, and instead proposed doing the opposite: what has subsequently become known as austerity.

What was the intellectual basis of his departure from economic credibility? Could it have been that fiscal contractions were actually expansionary, an idea that certainly qualifies a whacky. Was it the idea that the central bank, by using a completely untried and untested instrument, had everything under control? Or was it something else. The honest answer is we do not know, which is interesting in itself. But what is absolutely clear, based on surveys and other evidence, is that his advocacy of fiscal contraction in 2009 went against what most macroeconomists thought were the implications of their discipline.

You know the rest of the story. By departing from mainstream macroeconomics, George Osborne arguably won not one but two elections. Does his example show that there is nothing wrong with departing from ‘credible economics’ - it could even win you elections? That is perhaps the lesson some in the Corbyn camp would like to draw. It certainly suggests that there is very little relationship between policies that have ‘economic credibility’ and mainstream economics. Economic credibility, as used by politicians and the media, seems to be something rather different. As Chris Dillow suggests, it can mean acceptable to the Westminster-media Bubble, but that in turn may derive from some concoction of views that serve dominant political interests, and in macro the views of the financial sector and central banks.

If you want a non-macro example, consider the minimum wage. Setting the right level for this is a delicate balance, requiring all the empirical knowledge that labour economists have gleaned. In the UK we have an institution, the Low Pay Commission, to get this judgement right. That same George Osborne threw all that aside in his last budget because it was politically convenient to do. Did he get berated from all quarters for not following ‘credible economics’? Of course not.

Unfortunately, I think ABC are right that something called economic credibility matters a great deal when it comes to winning elections. Also unfortunately, I think they do not realise that economic credibility is something that gets defined in a complex social and political process, and can (and currently does) have very little to do with the economics taught in universities. Right now, in the UK and elsewhere, I think the political right understands that, but the political left of whatever variety does not.

Raising the minimum wage

It is fascinating when two highly respected, internationally known economics professors at London universities (LSE and UCL) disagree about a policy on which they are both experts. The policy is the increase in the national minimum wage (NMW) contained in the last Osborne budget. The disagreement is not the one you might expect, and nor do I think it reflects underlying differences (if any) in the politics of the two individuals. 

The debate is often between those who appeal to standard theory that says raising the NMW must reduce employment, and those who appeal to the evidence which says this hardly happens. But in this case the theorist, Alan Manning, is arguing for the policy of a higher NMW, while it is the empiricist, Steve Machin, who disapproves of the policy.

Let’s start with Machin. As well as having published work on the impact of minimum wages, he also sits on the Low Pay Commission (LPC) which before the budget was responsible for setting the minimum wage. In a letter to the FT, together with another academic member of the LPC Robert Elliot, he writes:

“The path of the NMW has until now been determined by careful and considered recourse to the evidence. The chancellor has at a stroke removed the rationale for the LPC and ensured that the path of the NMW will be determined by the priorities of whichever party forms a government.”

Although the argument here is essentially about the politicisation of setting the NMW, you could argue that he is also implicitly suggesting that by setting a NMW substantially above levels recommended by the LPC Osborne will do more harm than good.

Alan Manning is a pioneer of the theory of monopsony applied to the labour market. The idea here is that the employer has considerable power over the employee. The example normally given is that of a large employer in a small town, where the opportunities to the employee to find alternative work are limited or very costly. However Manning argues that monopsony is more generally applicable. In his book on the subject he writes

“The existence of [labour market] frictions gives employers potential market power over their workers. The assumption that firms set wages means that they actually exercise this power.”

The kind of frictions he has in mind are the time, effort and costs involved in finding a new job. Of course the employer faces similar costs, but Manning argues they matter more to the worker than to the firm. This means that wages can be above or below the level they would be under perfect competition with no frictions, and the greater power of the firm means that in practice they will be below. As a result, the outside imposition of a higher wage will not necessarily lead to lower employment, but may simply alter the way the ‘rent’ caused by labour market frictions is split between employee and employer. [1]

This theory does not, of course, suggest that minimum wages can be set without limit, but Alan Manning is suggesting that the evidence is not strong enough to say that Osborne’s proposal goes beyond those limits. He does not pretend to know that the LPC has been wrong to set a lower NMW. Instead he argues that sometimes it is good to experiment. He writes:

“Evidence-based policymaking does require experimentation with policies whose effects are unknown otherwise one simply preserves the status quo. It is as important to try new policies that one thinks have benefits as to have stringent ex-post analysis of those policies. I think the new policy is one well worth trying but I don’t pretend to know that there will be no substantial adverse effects.”

He argues that this experiment will give the LPC a new lease of life as it evaluates the results of the experiment.

I have no clear idea who is right. However we can make some progress by looking at which industries employ most on low pay. James Plunkett has a nice diagram here, and he argues that most sectors can easily afford to pay higher wages without reducing employment (or more precisely, that at the moment the rents that come from labour market frictions are mostly taken by the employer): sectors like retail or food and beverage services. An exception is residential care, but as he and Manning note, the price for these is largely determined by the government.

I agree with Machin that it is good to delegate complex economic issues like setting the NMW to expert bodies like the LPC. However it is also difficult to imagine such institutions ever saying why don’t we take a risk and do an experiment. It is also significant that the political intervention in this case does not fit the natural inclinations of the political party in power. In this case who turns out to be right will depend on whether this intervention is a one off or becomes a habit, and the reaction of whoever is Chancellor if the LPC judges the experiment to have failed.  

[1] An alternative argument is that both employer and employee will reap benefits from higher wages, because these will encourage higher retention and productivity. These efficiency wage arguments are discussed by Ben Chu.

A budget for our next Prime Minister

There is a simple way to read George Osborne’s budgets. Forget the economics, and just think politics.

Take the macroeconomics of aggregate fiscal policy, for example. Many pages have been filled (in some cases by me) about the folly of fiscal austerity while interest rates are near their lower bound. Under the coalition I calculated (with the OBR’s help) that this policy cost the average household the equivalent of at least £4,000 over the last five years. The arguments put forward to support this misguided policy have changed, but they seem to get worse rather than better: I go through the latest in this short piece for today’s Independent. But the focus on the deficit helped Osborne win the last election (admittedly with the help of Labour’s reluctance to challenge what he said), and is on course to lead to a radical reduction in the size of the UK state, as Colin Talbot sets out here.

How about his bold move of a substantial increase in the minimum wage? At first sight it seems very strange: it is a policy that if introduced by Labour would have much of the press, and most economic journalists, screaming about unnecessary interference with the market and the onset of socialism. Until now the level of the minimum wage has been carefully calculated by the Low Pay Commission to avoid significant job losses. The OBR calculate that Osborne’s proposed hike will lose about 60,000 people their jobs. But as Tim Harford explains, it is not as if Osborne has an alternative economic view. He just needed a dramatic move to give him political cover for his large cuts in tax credits.

Most of those on low earnings will still be worse off - by a lot in some cases, often decreasing work incentives - but he knows from the last election that impressions are more significant than numbers. [1] Probably the most important impact of this budget will be to raise poverty, particularly child poverty. The previous coalition’s policy changes also increased poverty, but their impact on the official statistics was offset by the overall decline in real wages. Over the next five years that will no longer happen, so again the cover is being put in place: change the definition of poverty. The economics is ludicrous, but we should have got used to that by now.

Then there is inheritance tax. It is not often I agree with Janan Ganesh, but he is correct when he wrote just before the budget:

 “George Osborne wants to refurbish the Conservatives as the natural habitation for working people … But the message will always be muffled as long as the tax system favours assets, including those bequeathed, over earned income … the greatest perversity of the system survives and will only worsen if the threshold for inheritance tax is lifted this week.”

But this year, and probably for the next one or two, George Osborne has a more important political goal in mind than confining Labour to opposition (particularly when they are doing just fine without his help). He wants to be sure that when David Cameron steps down, as he has promised to do, it will be George Osborne who is seen as the natural successor. Most of the Conservative base is not devoted to the cause of free markets, but is passionate about their own families’ income and wealth. It also likes high defence spending, so the budget contained a commitment to keep to the 2% Nato target. For those who hope for measures to tackle what Chris Dillow calls the true ‘something for nothing’ culture, the UK housing market, I suspect that too will not happen before the Conservative Party have elected their new leader (if it happens at all).    

If this sounds too cynical to you, all I can say is that I learn from experience. When I wrote this three years ago, Paul Krugman no less said I was getting “remarkably cynical”. Unfortunately, save for one detail, my cynicism proved pretty accurate. When it comes to implementing good (evidence based) economic policy, in both the UK and the rest of Europe, we are living through very depressing times.

[1] Postscript: the reaction of the UK press is outlined here

What is it about German economics?

I recently had the privilege to speak in Berlin at the 10th anniversary celebration of the Macroeconomic Policy Institute (IMK). (The talk I gave, on the Knowledge Transmission Mechanism, is here if anyone really wants to watch it.) I had known about the IMK for some time through reading incisive posts by Andrew Watt on the Social Europe website, but more recently I had been citing important papers by other IMK economists looking at the costs of austerity. You could describe the IMK group within Germany in various ways (see below), but one would be an island of Keynesian thinking in a sea that was rather hostile to Keynesian ideas.

As my talk, and this subsequent post, focused on how Keynesian ideas are pretty mainstream elsewhere, this raises an obvious puzzle: why does macroeconomics in Germany seem to be an outlier? Given the damage done by austerity in the Eurozone, and the central role that the views of German policy makers have played in that, this is a question I have asked for many years. The textbooks used to teach macroeconomics in Germany seem to be as Keynesian as elsewhere, yet Peter Bofinger is the only Keynesian on their Council of Economic Experts, and he confirmed to me how much this minority status is typical. [1]

There are two explanations that are popular outside Germany that I now think on their own are inadequate. The first is that Germany is preoccupied by inflation as a result of the hyperinflation of the Weimar republic, and that this spills over into their attitude to government debt. (The recession of the 1930s helped create a more serious disaster, and here is a provocative account of why the memory of hyperinflation dominates.) A second idea is that Germans are culturally debt averse, and people normally note that the German for debt is also their word for guilt. The trouble with both stories is that they imply that German government debt should be much lower than in other countries, but it is not. (In 2000, the German government’s net financial liabilities as a percentage of GDP were at the same level as France, and slightly above the UK and US.)

A mistake here may be to focus too much on macroeconomics. Germany has recently introduced a minimum wage: much later than in the UK or US. I think it would be fair to say that German economists generally advised against this. In the UK and US the opinion of economists on the minimum wage issue is much more balanced, largely because there is a great deal of academic evidence that at a moderate level the minimum wage does not reduce employment significantly. So here German economics also appears to be an outlier.

Many people have heard of ordoliberalism. It would be easy to equate ordoliberalism with neoliberalism, and argue that German attitudes simply reflect the ideological dominance of neo/ordoliberal ideas. However, as I once tried to argue, because ordoliberalism recognises actual departures from an ideal of perfect markets and the need for state action in dealing with those departures (e.g. monopoly), it is potentially much more amenable to New Keynesian ideas than neoliberalism. Yet in practice ordoliberalism does not appear to allow such flexibility. It is as if in some respects economic thinking in Germany has not moved on since the 1970s: Keynesian ideas are still viewed as anti-market rather than correcting market failure, and views on the minimum wage have not taken on board market distortions like monopsony. But that observation simply prompts the question of why in these respects German economics has remained isolated from mainstream academic ideas. [2]

One of the distinctive characteristics of the German economy appears to be very far from neoliberalism, and that is co-determination: the importance of workers organisations in management, and more generally the recognition that unions play an important role in the economy. Yet I wonder whether this may have had an unintended consequence: the polarisation and politicisation of economic policy advice. The IMK is part of the Hans-Böckler-Foundation, which is linked to the German Confederation of Trade Unions. The IMK was set up in part to provide a counterweight to existing think tanks with strong links to companies and employers. If conflict over wages is institutionalised at the national level, perhaps the influence of ideology on economic policy - in so far as it influences that conflict (see footnote [1]) - is bound to be greater. 

As you can see, I remain some way from answering the question posed in the title of this post, but I think I’m a bit further forward than I was.  

[1] The ‘Hamburger Appell’ of 2005, signed by over 250 German economists, is clearly anti-Keynesian. The intellectual rationale given there is unclear, but one theme is that a more effective way of increasing employment is to increase international competitiveness by holding down domestic costs. Now if you are part of a fixed exchange rate regime or a monetary union, and you have - for institutional reasons - an ability to influence domestic wage costs that other countries that belong to the regime do not have, then it may make perfect Keynesian sense to use that instrument. This is exactly what happened (deliberately or not) from 2000 to 2007, which of course is a major reason why Germany is currently not suffering the recession being experienced by the Eurozone as a whole. (Of course, unlike a fiscal stimulus, it is a beggar my neighbour policy, because demand increases at the expense of other countries in the regime: for the regime as a whole a flexible exchange rate will offset the impact of lower costs on competitiveness.)

[2] On this isolation see Tony Yates here. At the end of this post Tony also references an interesting discussion regarding ordoliberalism and other issues in comments on a post of my own: see here.   

Bonus Culture

The comments I received on my post about a maximum wage were interesting for many reasons. In this post I just want to focus on one common misperception. This is that a maximum wage, because it interferes with the market, must be distortionary and therefore something that should tend to be avoided. This in turn assumes that the actual economy approximates the competitive efficient allocation students learn about in Econ 101, which is what neoliberals would like people to believe.

To see why this might well not be true when it comes to high pay, I want to briefly discuss a paper (NBER version here) by Roland Bénabou and Jean Tirole, which has the title of this post. I will try and make my discussion as non-technical as possible.

The basic idea is as follows. Jobs involve two types of activity or output, one of which is measurable and one is not. To reflect this, pay involves two components: a fixed component, which the worker always gets, and a performance element (the bonus) which depends on the worker’s measured output. The firm wants the worker to undertake both types of activity, so it sets the appropriate relationship between the two elements of pay to make sure the worker puts the right amount of effort into each type of activity. I will talk about what these two types of activity might be in practice below.

So far, so good. But now we add an information problem. There are two types of workers: the ordinary and the talented. The talented worker is much better at producing the measurable output. The firm cannot tell the two types apart, but it would naturally like to attract some of the more talented workers. One way it can do this is to offer two types of remuneration package: a ‘low bonus’ type and a ‘high bonus’ type. Talented workers will be attracted to the high bonus package, because their talent means that they can achieve high measured output (and therefore high pay) with relatively little effort.

This is useful for the firm, but it creates a problem. The bonus payment is now doing two jobs: allocating worker effort between activities, and attracting talented workers. In these circumstances, the bonus payment can depart from its efficient level. In particular the paper shows (p13) that in a competitive labour market, bonus payments designed for talented workers will be too high, in the sense that they lead to these workers putting too much effort into the measured activity, and too little into the other activity.

So what might these two activities (one measurable, one not) be in practice. The paper suggests, for measurable activities, things like sales, output, trading profits, and billable medical procedures, and for immeasurable activities things like intangible investments affecting long run value, financial or legal risk-taking, and cooperation among individuals or divisions. So the problem is that, in an effort to attract talented workers, the firm over incentivises effort on achieving tangible short term goals at the expense of work on intangible, longer term objectives.

The relationship to my discussion of a maximum wage should now be clear. To quote from the paper: “Turning to policy implications, we show that a cap on bonuses can restore balance in agents’ incentives, and even re-establish the first best, as long as it does not induce employers to switch to some alternative “currency” to screen employees.”

If you want to think about how this idea relates to alternative models of executive pay and competition for talent, I would encourage you to read section 1.1 of the paper, which is not too technical. The paper also contains a lot more that will be of interest to economists.

The general point I want to make is this. We can think about the minimum wage as an unfortunate interference in the market which can nevertheless be justified on equity grounds, or as a means of reducing poverty. However we can also see it as a way of increasing the efficiency of the economy, because many employers of low paid workers can exploit their monopoly power to pay wages that are below the efficient level (monopsony). Exactly the same may be true of the maximum wage. It could be that top pay is inefficiently high because executives have monopoly power, or it could be as this paper suggests because the firm wants to attract unobservable talent. I see no reason to presume that the dramatic increase in top pay reflects increases in the productivity of those workers.

  

If minimum wages, why not maximum wages?

I was in a gathering of academics the other day, and we were discussing minimum wages. The debate moved on to increasing inequality, and the difficulty of doing anything about it. I said why not have a maximum wage? To say that the idea was greeted with incredulity would be an understatement. So you want to bring back price controls was once response. How could you possibly decide on what a maximum wage should be was another.

So why the asymmetry? Why is the idea of setting a maximum wage considered outlandish among economists?

The problem is clear enough. All the evidence, in the US and UK, points to the income of the top 1% rising much faster than the average. Although the share of income going to the top 1% in the UK fell sharply in 2010, the more up to date evidence from the US suggests this may be a temporary blip caused by the recession. The latest report from the High Pay Centre in the UK says:

“Typical annual pay for a FTSE 100 CEO has risen from around £100-£200,000 in the early 1980s to just over £1 million at the turn of the 21st century to £4.3 million in 2012. This represented a leap from around 20 times the pay of the average UK worker in the 1980s to 60 times in 1998, to 160 times in 2012 (the most recent year for which full figures are available).”

I find the attempts of some economists and journalists to divert attention away from this problem very revealing. The most common tactic is to talk about some other measure of inequality, whereas what is really extraordinary and what worries many people is the rise in incomes at the very top. The suggestion that we should not worry about national inequality because global inequality has fallen is even more bizarre. 

What lies behind this huge increase in inequality at the top? The problem with the argument that it just represents higher productivity of CEOs and the like is that this increase in inequality is much more noticeable in the UK and US than in other countries, yet there is no evidence that CEOs in UK and US based firms have been substantially outperforming their overseas rivals. I discussed in this post a paper by Piketty, Saez and Stantcheva which set out a bargaining model, where the CEO can put more or less effort into exploiting their monopoly power within a company. According to this model, CEOs in the UK and US have since 1980 been putting more bargaining effort than their overseas counterparts. Why? According to Piketty et al, one answer may be that top tax rates fell in the 1980s in both countries, making the returns to effort much greater.

If you believe this particular story, then one solution is to put top tax rates back up again. Even if you do not buy this story, the suspicion must be that this increase in inequality represents some form of market failure. Even David Cameron agrees. The solution the UK government has tried is to give more power to the shareholders of the firm. The High Pay Centre notes that: “Thus far, shareholders have not used their new powers to vote down executive pay proposals at a single FTSE 100 company.”, although as the FT report shareholder ‘revolts’ are becoming more common. My colleague Brian Bell and John Van Reenen do note in a recent study “that firms with a large institutional investor base provide a symmetric pay-performance schedule while those with weak institutional ownership protect pay on the downside.” However they also note that “a specific group of workers that account for the majority of the gains at the top over the last decade [are] financial sector workers .. [and] .. the financial crisis and Great Recession have left bankers largely unaffected.”

So increasing shareholder power may only have a small effect on the problem. So why not consider a maximum wage? One possibility is to cap top pay as some multiple of the lowest paid, as a recent Swiss referendum proposed. That referendum was quite draconian, suggesting a multiple of 12, yet it received a large measure of popular support (35% in favour, 65% against). The Swiss did vote to ban ‘golden hellos and goodbyes’. One neat idea is to link the maximum wage to the minimum wage, which would give CEOs an incentive to argue for higher minimum wages! Note that these proposals would have no disincentive effect on the self-employed entrepreneur. 

If economists have examined these various possibilities, I have missed it. One possible reason why many economists seem to baulk at this idea is that it reminds them too much of the ‘bad old days’ of incomes policies and attempts by governments to fix ‘fair wages’. But this is an overreaction, as a maximum wage would just be the counterpart to the minimum wage. I would be interested in any other thoughts about why the idea of a maximum wage seems not to be part of economists’ Overton window. 

Hitting the poor and the disabled

In the UK, Wales has a degree of regional autonomy. This has helped shed some light on two aspects of UK government policy: taking income from the disabled and the working poor.

The Welsh government asked the highly respected Institute of Fiscal Studies (IFS) to examine the cumulative impact of the coalition government’s tax and benefit reforms up until April 2015. Ideally we would like such an assessment for the UK, but the government has said this would be ‘difficult’ and ‘meaningless’. However there is no reason why findings for Wales should be very different to the UK as a whole, and the Welsh government - run by Labour - had no inhibitions asking the IFS to do this for Wales.

In terms of income distribution, the report’s findings are summarised in this chart.

Summary of gains and losses across the income distribution, 2014–15 prices. From “The distributional effects of the UK government’s tax and welfare reforms in Wales: an update” by David Phillips, IFS.

The chart speaks for itself, except to say that UC and PIP stand for the new Universal Credit and Personal Independence Payments schemes, which will not have their full impact until beyond 2015.

The study also looks at how this breaks down among particular groups. Pensioners fare relatively well, losing only 0.5% of income as a result of all these changes. In contrast the working age disabled are hit relatively badly, suffering on average a 6.5% loss. Yet this loss may pale into insignificance compared to the fear that has been created by the government’s new assessment procedures, contracted out to private firms whose methods are confidential. (See also these case studies by Demos, and Alex Marsh and the Economist on the government’s welfare reform in general.)

You might cynically think that this kind of thing is an inevitable result of austerity, where help to the poor and disabled is considered a luxury that society can no longer afford. Certainly the UK is not alone here. However the second policy has nothing to do with austerity. As part of its drive to reduce ‘red tape’, the government abolished the Agricultural Wages Board (AWB), the last surviving wages council which set minimum terms and conditions for agricultural workers. The government’s argument was that the Board hindered ‘flexibility’ in the labour market, and that it duplicated the role of the national minimum wage.

The last argument is simplistic. Although the AWB set a basic hourly rate very similar to the national minimum wage, it also set overtime rates, which as anyone living near a farm will know are particularly relevant to farm workers. The importance of this can be found from the government’s own impact assessment of abolition, which suggests a transfer of as much as £33.4 million from farm workers to farm owners as a result of abolishing the AWB. (Farm workers are poorly paid on average: in 2011 the average wage was £8.17 per hour, compared to a minimum wage of £6.08.)

As to the need to increase market flexibility by reducing external intervention, this is particularly rich given the scale of public subsidies received by this sector. This government has fought hard to maintain the subsidies from Europe that go to large farms, so no free market there. Farm workers themselves are particularly powerless compared to their employers, which is why the AWB was the one wages council that the previous Conservative government did not abolish in 1993.  

What has this got to do with Wales? The Welsh government argued that it had the power to keep an AWB for Wales. The UK government disagreed, and took this all the way to the Supreme Court, but last Wednesday it lost. So Welsh farm workers will retain some protection.

I would love to say that these two cases are isolated examples, but they are not. Conservative ministers have recently proposed additional restrictions on the right to strike, requiring over 50% of all eligible members to vote in favour of strike action before a strike can be called. As Steven Toft says, this is a strikingly stupid idea, and is essentially just an attempt to further weaken an already weak trade union movement. In terms of the future of the welfare state, the Chancellor’s plans for future austerity require yet further reductions. With pensions protected, this means the disabled will be in the firing line once again.   

The trouble with teaching macroeconomics: minimum wages and immigration

                I’m in the middle of lecturing on our second year macroeconomics course. There is so much ground to cover in a short amount of time, so on many occasions I have to stop myself launching into a long discussion about why the world is much more complicated than the simple model I’m presenting. One example that will be familiar to many is the impact of minimum wages on employment, where the evidence may not fit the standard textbook model. (The work of Card &  Krueger is well known, but those in the US may be less familiar with similar work in the UK. Some recent work discussing international evidence is here.)

                I used to be more comfortable about using the standard labour market model, coupled with the variant involving imperfectly competitive goods and labour markets, to analyse the impact of immigration. The idea that immigration was initially unpopular because it led either to lower real wages for the indigenous workforce, or an increase in the amount of involuntary unemployment generated by imperfect competition, seemed to accord with popular perceptions (although see here (10/2/2012) for a discussion of the origin of such perceptions). And I was always careful to add that any decline in real wages would disappear in the long run, as it would be eliminated by increased investment. However work in the UK has suggested that in this case the simple model may be seriously misleading once again.

In early January the Government’s independent Migration Advisory Committee (MAC) published a report which was widely reported as finding that “an increase of 100 foreign-born working-age migrants in the UK was associated with a reduction of 23 natives in employment for the period 1995 to 2010.” However further reading of the report finds this result is not at all robust. At the same time the National Institute published findings that found no impact of immigration on unemployment. The two pieces of analysis are compared by Jonathan Portes here. Ian Preston at the Centre for Research and Analysis of Migration (CReAM) at UCL notes (16/1/2012) that ‘There have been studies in several countries and the preponderance of evidence is strongly suggestive that employment effects are small if they exist at all.’ (Here is a recent US study focusing on the impact on poverty.)

What about wages? The MAC study’s summary of empirical work on the impact of immigration on wages concludes “The majority of studies estimate that migrants had little impact on average wages, differing in their assessments of whether migrants raised or lowered average wages.”  There seems to be a common finding that immigration lowers wages a little at the bottom of the income distribution, but raises them at the top. This is hardly consistent with the simple textbook labour market model.

Perhaps we can content ourselves that the textbook model might still be reliable for much larger changes in migration or minimum wages, but that for more modest changes factors like heterogeneity due to skill shortages or monopsony can account for the empirical evidence cited above. However, even if I did have time to make these qualifications to the basic model in my lectures, would students remember them, or just remember the predictions of the model?