Those who take the meat from the table,
teach contentment.
Those for whom the taxes are destined,
demand sacrifice.
Those who eat their fill, speak to the hungry,
of wonderful times to come.
Those who lead the country into the abyss,
call ruling too difficult,
for ordinary folk.
Bertolt Brecht
In DSGE models the unemployed are happier than the employed
from Lars Syll
January, 2014 at 21:50 | Posted in Economics | 2 Comments
In the model [Gali, Smets and Wouters, Unemployment in an Estimated New Keyesian Model (2011)] there is perfect consumption insurance among the members of the household.
Because of separability in utility, this implies that consumption is equalized across all workers, whether they are employed or not … Workers who find that they do not have to work are unemployed or out of the labor force, and they have cause to rejoice as a result. Unemployed workers enjoy higher utility than the employed because they receive the same level of consumption, but without having to work.
There is much evidence that in practice unemployment is not the happy experience it is for workers in the model. For example, Chetty and Looney (2006) and Gruber (1997) find that US households suffer roughly a 10 percent drop in consumption when they lose their job. According to Couch and Placzek (2010), workers displaced through mass layoffs suffer substantial and extended reductions in earnings. Moreover, Oreopoulos, Page and Stevens (2008) present evidence that the children of displaced workers also suffer reduced earnings. Additional evidence that unemployed workers suffer a reduction in utility include the results of direct interviews, as well as findings that unemployed workers experience poor health outcomes. Clark and Oswald (1994), Oswald (1997) and Schimmack, Schupp and Wagner (2008) describe evidence that suggests unemployment has a negative impact on a worker’s self-assessment of well being. Sullivan and von Wachter (2009) report that the mortality rates of high-seniority workers jump 50-100% more than would have been expected otherwise in the year after displacement. Cox and Koo (2006) report a significant positive correlation between male suicide and unemployment in Japan and the United States. For additional evidence that unemployment is associated with poor health outcomes, see Fergusson, Horwood and Lynskey (1997) and Karsten and Moser (2009) …
Suppose the CPS [Current Population Survey] employee encountered one of the people designated as “unemployed” … and asked if she were “available for work”. What would her answer be? She knows with certainty that she will not be employed in the current period. Privately, she is delighted about this because the non-employed enjoy higher utility than the employed … Not only is she happy about not having to work, but the labor union also does not want her to work. From the perspective of the union, her non-employment is a fundamental component of the union’s strategy for promoting the welfare of its membership.
Out of the frying pan into the fire — DSGE and Ricardian equivalence
from Lars Syll
Benchmark DSGE models have paid little attention to the role of fiscal policy, therefore minimising any possible interaction of fiscal policies with monetary policy. This has been partly because of the assumption of Ricardian equivalence. As a result, the distribution of taxes across time become irrelevant and aggregate financial wealth does not matter for the behavior of agents or for the dynamics of the economy because bonds do not represent net real wealth for households.
Incorporating more meaningfully the role of fiscal policies requires abandoning frameworks with the Ricardian equivalence. The question is how to break the Ricardian equivalence? Two possibilities are available. The first is to move to an overlapping generations framework and the second (which has been the most common way of handling the problem) is to rely on an infinite-horizon model with a type of liquidity constrained agents (eg “rule of thumb agents”).
Ricardian equivalence basically means that financing government expenditures through taxes or debts is equivalent, since debt financing must be repaid with interest, and agents — equipped with rational expectations — would only increase savings in order to be able to pay the higher taxes in the future, thus leaving total expenditures unchanged.
There is, of course, no reason for us to believe in that fairy-tale. Ricardo himself — mirabile dictu — didn’t believe in Ricardian equivalence. In “Essay on the Funding System” (1820) he wrote:
But the people who paid the taxes never so estimate them, and therefore do not manage their private affairs accordingly. We are too apt to think that the war is burdensome only in proportion to what we are at the moment called to pay for it in taxes, without reflecting on the probable duration of such taxes. It would be difficult to convince a man possessed of £20,000, or any other sum, that a perpetual payment of £50 per annum was equally burdensome with a single tax of £1000.
And as one Nobel Prize laureate had it:
Ricardian equivalence is taught in every graduate school in the country. It is also sheer nonsense.
Joseph E. Stiglitz, twitter
So, I totally agree that macroeconomic models have to abandon Ricardian equivalence nonsense. But replacing it with “overlapping generations” and “infinite-horizon” models — isn’t that — in terms of realism and relevance — just getting out of the frying pan into the fire?