Month: August 2014

What is the least nonsensical interpretation of this result?

New research by Esther Friedman of the RAND Corporation and Robert Mare of UCLA finds that parents of college grads live two years longer than parents whose kids didn’t graduate high school. That two-year bump in life expectancy for parents of the most-educated kids is surprisingly large – it amounts to about two-thirds of the longevity benefit of running every day.

Even more surprising: your kids’ educational attainments have a bigger effect on your life expectancy than your own schooling. While sending your kid to college adds two years to your life relative to letting them flunk out of high school, getting a college degree yourself only adds 1.7 years to your life compared to not having a high school degree.

That is from Christopher Ingraham, the full story is here.

American firms are aging too

The share of firms aged 16 years or more was 23 percent in 1992, but leaped to 34 percent by 2011—an increase of 50 percent in two decades. The share of private-sector workers employed in these mature firms increased from 60 percent to 72 percent during the same period. Perhaps most startling, we find that employment and firm shares declined for every other firm age group during this period.

We explore three potential contributing factors driving the increasing share of economic activity occurring in older firms, and find that a secular decline in entrepreneurship is playing a major role. We also believe that increasing early-stage firm failure rates might be a growing factor.

From Ian Hathaway and Robert E. Litan, there is more here.

Why is euro-area inflation so low?

Sober Look has the numbers, for instance:

The area’s CPI is now below 0.5% on a year-over-year basis. Yesterday we saw German CPI hit new lows (see chart) and Italy’s inflation rate is now hovering just above zero.

What is the most economical model here?  The ECB invested in building up a lot of credibility in some areas, such as price level stability, but that means less credibility when it comes to pushing higher inflation.  So to get two percent inflation, perhaps the ECB has to genuinely and truly seek four percent inflation, because a big chunk of the market won’t believe they really want four percent.  Four will get them to two.

The ECB in fact may be wishing for two percent price inflation and getting…less than that.  Which in turn conditions market participants to doubt the commitment of the ECB to the rates of price inflation which it claims to be seeking.  The ECB and the citizenry can get stuck in a self-fulfilling prophecies equilibrium, yet without requiring a standard liquidity trap.

I don’t by the way think of this as a time consistency problem.  The ECB doesn’t want to be in a position where it is genuinely shooting for four percent inflation, even if that means it will end up imposing only two percent on the Germans.  They are still caught with their proverbial pants down and their internal culture of inflation love would be seen as unacceptable and illegal too.  Yes, the ECB is selfish, and law-abiding as well, as its charter mandates price stability as the goal.

And you know what?  When “selfish” and “law-abiding” point in the same direction, that is very often what you will get.