Category: Economics

The Law of Unintended Consequences

Dubner and Levitt have an article in the NYTimes with three examples of the law of unintended consequences, the Americans with Disabilities Act made it more costly to hire people with disabilities and reduced their employment, ancient Jewish sabbatical law intended to help the poor has made them worse off, and the endangered species act has resulted in habitat destruction.

In light of this Andrew Gelman asks a deep question, What kind of law is the "law of unintended consequences?"

The law of unintended consequences is what happens when a simple system tries to regulate a complex system.   The political system is simple, it operates with limited information (rational ignorance), short time horizons, low feedback, and poor and misaligned incentives.  Society in contrast is a complex, evolving, high-feedback, incentive-driven system.  When a simple system tries to regulate a complex system you often get unintended consequences.

Unintended consequences are not restricted to government regulation of society but can also happen when government tries to regulate other complex systems such as the ecosystem (e.g. fire prevention policy that reduces forest diversity and increases mass fires, dam building that destroys wet lands and makes floods more likely etc.)  Unintended consequences can even happen in the attempted regulation of complex physical systems (here is a classic example involving turbulence).

The fact that unintended consequences of government regulation are usually (but not always or necessarily) negative is not an accident.  A regulation requiring apartments to have air-conditioning, for example, pushes the rental contract against the landlord and in favor of the tenant but the landlord can easily push back by raising the rent and in so doing will create a situation where both the landlord and tenant are worse off.

More generally, when regulation pushes against incentives, incentives tend to push back creating unintended consequences.  Not all regulation pushes against incentives, some regulations try to change incentives but incentives are complex and constraints change so even incentive-driven regulations can have unintended consequences.

Does the law of unintended consequences mean that the government should never try to regulate complex systems?  No, of course not, but it does mean that regulators should be humble (no trying to remake man and society) and the hurdle for regulation should be high.

Markets in Everything – Relief Pitcher Earnings

Randy Newsom, relief pitcher for the Cleveland Indians, is selling 4% of his future major league salary.  There are 2,500 shares in the IPO so each share gets you a claim to 0.0016% of his future salary including bonuses.  Shares sell for $20 each.

Hat tip to Mike Makowsky.   Mike, a rookie GMU PhD on the job market, is also entertaining offers for a share of his future salary.  Mike is feeling rather risk-averse so as an insider, I recommend you buy now.  Mike has a great career ahead of him and this opportunity won’t last long!

New issue of Econ Journal Watch

Find it here, lots of goodies as always.  Here is a section called Sounds of Silence: "individuals who probably should have replied to the critique but didn’t."  Other topics include whether casinos cause crime, the Earned Income Tax Credit, suburbanization, usury, and Paul Krugman, all edited by my colleague Daniel Klein.

Elsewhere on the web, here is a long podcast with Austan Goolsbee.

Investment tax credit as fiscal stimulus

It looks like we will get some fiscal stimulus, despite my cogent objections (I know, big surprise.)  One part of the stimulus package will probably be an investment tax credit which does have some good properties.  Unlike traditional fiscal policy an investment tax credit cannot be fully crowded out and it works best when it is expected to be temporary. 

Cuts in income taxes and increases in spending must be paid for somehow, so traditional fiscal policy can be crowded out by declines in private spending (My colleague Russ Roberts says fiscal policy is like trying to raise the water level by dipping a bucket in the deep end of a pool and dumping it in the shallow end.)  But an investment tax credit works through a change in incentives – it increases the incentive to invest now, when times are tough, at the expense of less future investment when times are better.

Also, cuts in income taxes stimulate the least when they are expected to be temporary.  But in contrast, an investment tax credit stimulates the most when it is expected to be temporary.  (A temporary credit must be used now or lost while a permanent credit gives you the option to wait).

Thus, a broad-based, temporary investment tax credit has some appeal as fiscal stimulus.   

Are African wages too high?

One thing that has always struck me in the African countries I have
worked is that the real wages (i.e. wages adjusted for the cost of
living) of African formal sector workers seem to be incredibly high, at
least compared to that of workers in China or India. Given that firms
in China and India seem to be more productive than their African
counterparts, it creates a double disadvantage for African workers, and
raises the question of why the situation continues. Why don’t
manufacturing wages fall in Africa, stimulating more jobs for more
people at wages still higher than those available in agriculture or
informal business?

Why, when I run a survey in rural Uganda, do
youth with the same education and experience expect a wage three to
four times higher than the youth I worked with in India? I don’t
begrudge anyone anywhere a living wage. It’s the relative differential
that puzzles me, and that could be keeping Africa from doing business
globally.

There are probably lots of plausible reasons. Perhaps
we ought to consider (and get data on) the informal sector in Africa,
which could be larger and have more moderate wages than the formal
sector ones. It may be that all my notions and data about African wages
are erroneous.

Another possibility, however, is that the largest
employers of skilled workers in most African countries are
international NGOs and the local government. They are competing, in
many cases, for the same pool of skilled and semi-skilled workers as
the manufacturers and service sector firms. Neither the government or
NGOs, moreover, seem to set wages according to the local market or
local conditions, and it requires little imagination to wonder whether
they set their wages higher than the market would normally do.

That’s from Chris Blattman, a political science professor at Yale; here is Chris’s consistently interesting blog.

Justin Lin

He has been named the new chief economist at the World Bank.  Wikipedia claims he left his wife and family behind in Taiwan to defect to mainland China.  He even swam across some ocean to do so.  It seems to be true.

Why would I not pick this man?  But at least one smart person who knows Lin is very happy.  Here are some of Lin’s articles, including a well-cited piece for Cato Journal.  Here is his CV.  He must be very adept at dealing with bureaucracy.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose

A French court has ruled in favor of the French Bookseller’s Union that Amazon’s free shipping policy violates a law forbidding booksellers from offering discounts of
more than 5 percent off the list price.
Amazon was told to start charging for shipping within ten days or pay a
daily fine. It must also pay €100,000 to the French Booksellers’ Union.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, however, is refusing to charge for shipping and is taking the case to the French public.  Way to go Jeff!  My advice?  Tell the state, laissez nous faire!

Hat tip to A Chequer-Board of Nights and Days.

Hackers Extort Cities?

Criminals have been able to hack into computer systems via the Internet and cut power to several cities, a U.S. Central Intelligence Agency analyst said this week….

"We
have information, from multiple regions outside the United States, of
cyber intrusions into utilities, followed by extortion demands," he
said in a statement posted to the Web on Friday by the conference’s organizers, the SANS Institute.
"In at least one case, the disruption caused a power outage affecting
multiple cities. We do not know who executed these attacks or why, but
all involved intrusions through the Internet."

I am highly suspicious – why has no one heard of this before? – but every year I do feel more and more like I’m living in a Neal Stephenson novel.

Tax rebates don’t always work

Matt Shapiro and Joel Slemrod report:

Many households received income tax rebates in 2001 of $300 or $600. These rebates represented advance payments of the tax cut from the new 10 percent tax bracket. Based on a survey of a representative sample of households, this paper finds that only 22 percent of households receiving the rebate would spent it. Instead, they would either save it or use it to pay off debt. This very low rate of spending represents a striking break with past behavior, which would have suggested a much higher rate of spending. The low spending rate implies that the tax rebate provided a very limited stimulus to aggregate demand.

The pointer is from Angus.  Purely coincidentally, a moment later I read the following:

…both the White House and Congressional Democrats are leaning heavily
toward a combination similar to the one the administration turned to in
2001 as a recession-fighting tool. It would include a one-time tax
rebate for individuals and an immediate expansion in the deductions
that businesses take for investment in equipment. If Congress acts
quickly, checks could be in the hands of American taxpayers as early as
spring.

Hmm….By the way, here is the Elmendorf and Furman paper on fiscal stimulus.

Addendum: Don’t forget Alex’s post on this.  Mark Thoma and Bruce Bartlett are here, and as you might expect Greg Mankiw asks the correct pointed question.

In defense of (some) neuroeconomics

Andrew Samwick at Vox Baby reports on the neuroeconomics sessions at the AEAs.  He is justifiably impressed with the work of David Laibson.  Laibson has pioneered the theory and implications of hyperbolic discounting.

But a clever economist can always come up with a rational (time-consistent) model to explain what appears to be irrational hyperbolic discounting.  Laibson, however, uses fMRI scans to show that different parts of the brain are activated when making decisions at different time-scales.  As Andrew notes, the isolation of the different decisions to different parts of the brain gives Laibson’s argument significant credibility against more standard neo-classical explanations for the same phenomena.

How would tighter regulation affect mortgage origination?

Here’s one paper suggesting that regulation doesn’t necessarily solve current problems:

We find that most aspects of mortgage broker licensing systems, such as mandatory professional education, do not have a significant and consistent statistical association with market outcomes. However, one component — the requirement in many states that mortgage brokers maintain a surety bond or minimum net worth — does have a significant and fairly consistent statistical relationship with both labor and consumer market outcomes. In particular, we find that tighter bonding/net worth requirements are associated with fewer brokers, fewer subprime mortgages, higher foreclosure rates, and a greater percentage of high-interest-rate mortgages. Although we do not provide a full causal interpretation of these results, we take seriously the possibility that restrictive bonding requirements for mortgage brokers have unintended negative consequences for many consumers. On balance, our results also seem to support theories of occupational licensing that stress the importance of pure entry and exit barriers over those that focus more on the human capital effects of licensing.

Get that?  Tighter regulation does mean fewer subprime mortgages, but also higher foreclosure rates and higher interest rates on the mortgages.  This paper is hardly the final word, if only because broker licensing is not the only possible means of regulation.  But in the meantime caution is in order; don’t be attracted to the idea of tighter regulation simply because you feel we haven’t had good enough regulation so far.  Regulators are famous for fighting the last war, not preventing the crisis to come.

So far I’m not finding an ungated copy of this paper.

Larry Kotlikoff defends the Fair Tax

Here is the link, via Greg Mankiw.  If we are comparing the Fair Tax to the traditional VAT, compliance is issue number one and I’m not convinced by Kotlikoff’s defense:

This [compliance] is a reasonable concern, and one I share.  In examining the real revenue-neutral FairTax rate, my co-authors and I ignored compliance issues, not because they are unimportant, but rather because we had no firm basis for estimating their impact…

…it’s clear that the incentive to cheat will be significant. But it’s also clear that the incentive to evade income taxes is greater than would be the incentive to evade the FairTax.  Moreover, much of the evasion under the FairTax would come in the same form and done by the same actors as evasion under the income tax; for example, a waitress who fails to collect FairTax on tips is also, presumably, not paying income taxes on those tips under the current system….   

The reasons I’m not overly worried about evasions number five.  First, the vast majority of retail sales occur in major retail outlets, like WalMart.  Second, we’ll have vastly fewer taxpaying entities (14 million rather than more than 100 million) on which to focus our enforcement efforts.  Third, we’ll have hundreds of thousands of otherwise unemployed IRS agents, accountants, and tax attorneys to enlist to enforce a single tax.  Fourth, we can always compel firms to report, via 1099-type forms, their sales to other firms.  This will provide the same records that arise under a VAT.  Fifth, the government can stipulate that all retail sellers provide buyers with a written receipt, regardless of whether the transaction is or is not in cash, specifying that the FairTax has been paid. Thus if sellers don’t mail in the taxes, there will be a paper trail of the evasion. Sellers who try to bribe buyers to forgo receipts and split the FairTax among themselves run the risk of having the buyer turn them in.   

I would say this: push for a Fair Tax and if you’re lucky you’ll get something like a VAT, if only for reasons of enforcement.  Plus you’ll also get the same income tax we have now, which isn’t going away anytime soon.  New Zealand, of course, did something like this.  "Fair Tax = Tax Increase"; it’s a pretty good and simple slogan.

On most of Kotkiloff’s other points, he’s simply "fighting for a draw," as they say.  Think through federalism with no federal income tax as a base for state and local taxes.  The transition issues are a monster.  If encouraging savings is the main goal, why not just eliminate the taxation of capital income under the current scheme?

The Education of Ben Bernanke

Here is a long NYT piece on the Bernanke regime; here is Anna Schwartz complaining about Bernanke as Fed chair.  In the comments, I am taking nominations for the following: given perfect hindsight, what should the Fed have done and when?  Keep two things in mind: a) looser money sooner probably would not have helped the credit problems (and might have tied the Fed’s hands later on), and b) your recommendations cannot refer to actions which predate the Bernanke regime.