Some fallacies never die

Posted over a year ago as Modern Wage Economics: Too Subtle for the Blogosphere?, but some fallacies never die:

Our economy uses a lot less labor than it did 10 years ago, and for good reason people are interested in the relative importance of supply and demand factors for explaining what happened to the quantity of labor.

Naturally, a supply-demand decomposition exercise is enhanced by looking at both the quantity and price of labor, also known as the wage rate. That's why my book on the recession starts off with various indicators of wage rates and their dynamics (see chapter 2 beginning on page 9).

Three or four decades of labor economics research are of great assistance in this exercise. That research tells us that the price of labor from an employer's point of view is often significantly different than cash earnings per hour, and that a reduction in labor supply could be associated with reduced cash earnings even while it was increasing employer costs:

1. A reduction in labor supply could reduce the quality of labor, with workers putting in less effort, or doing less to maintain their skills, or become less attached to the labor market.  This tends to reduce cash earnings per hour because each hour is less productive.  These have been major factors in the analysis of women's wages, where most economist believe that women's hourly earnings increased as a consequence of supplying more (see Becker 1985, Goldin and Katz 2002, Mulligan and Rubinstein 2008, and many others). See also some of the literature on unemployment insurance such as Ljungqvist and Sargent's paper on European unemployment.
2. A reduction in labor supply or demand could increase the average quality of labor through a composition bias.  See p. 17ff of my book and the references cited therein.
3. Because of fringe benefits, cash hourly earnings are not the same as employer cost.  As employer health insurance expenditure has been growing over time, the growth of cash hourly earnings has substantially under-estimated the growth of employer cost.

The Incidence of Supply and Demand Impulses.

Labor economists have also long studied the incidence of supply and demand impulses: that is, the effects of supply and demand factors on both wage rates and the quantity of labor. The consensus is that: (a) labor demand is more wage elastic than labor supply and (b) labor demand is even more wage elastic in the long run than it is in the short run.

Suppose that the reduction in the quantity of labor were 50% due to demand factors and 50% due to supply factors, and that we had overcome all of the measurement issues cited above. Result (a) means that wages would fall in the short run, because supply shifts translate more into labor quantity than into wage rates while, in comparison, demand shifts translate more into wage rates than labor quantity. In this example, it would be wrong to conclude from reduced wage rates than supply is less important than demand for explaining the change in the quantity of labor.

To put it another way, if we found that wage rates (properly measured) were constant, but didn't know the relative contribution of demand and supply factors to the quantity change, result (a) tells us that the majority of the labor quantity change was due to supply factors. With a labor supply elasticity of 0.5 and labor demand elasticity of -3 (reasonably conservative short run estimates), the constant wage rate result means that 86 percent of the quantity change was due to supply factors and only 14 percent due to demand factors. In the long run, labor demand is even more wage elastic, and the share attributable to labor supply is even closer to 100%.

To put it yet another way, if it were true that labor demand explained the majority of the change in labor quantity, then employer costs (properly measured) would have fallen dramatically.

Despite all of these lessons from labor economics, blogosphere economists attempt to dissect the hourly cash earnings data to perhaps find a small and probably ill-timed reduction and jump to the conclusion that labor supply shifts have made a trivial contribution to the change in labor quantity.

Don't forget agricultural employment

The payroll report shows +142k (change from July to Aug), which seems low, but note that it excludes self-employed and agricultural workers. If you add those, it's +299k primarily because (seasonally adjusted) agricultural employment increased so much.

Real consumption

per person, it was less in July than each of the prior 4 months.

My one cent

Apple refused to list my book for $3.00 -- they listed it at $2.99.
Amazon went with the $3.00 price for about a week, and then cut it to $2.99.
BN is still charging $3.00.

The best way to read illustrated ebooks?

For multi-device users, amazon's free kindle app is nice. You can buy a book once and view the same book (including your personal bookmarks and notes) on PC, Mac, ios, android, and more. My only complaint here is that, unlike kindle for tablets and phones, kindle on PC or Mac does not let you double click one of the book's illustrations in order to enlarge it.

Apple's free ibooks app solves this problem with consistent image viewing in IOS and Mac: double tap or double click. In addition, the ibook store delivers to ipads an ipad-optimized version. For purchased books, ibooks synchronizes notes and bookmarks across all of your devices that have ibooks installed. I don't think ibooks will run on a PC, although in principle the itunes app will allow you to read an ibook that you purchased.

My work around for PC- or Mac-based kindle illustration views is to switch to (or stay in) full-screen single-column reading when I want a close look at an illustration. On a PC, the two buttons are next to each other on the kindle app bar (see the upper left in this screen shot):

On a Mac, the single-column button is the same and the full-screen button is Shift-Comm-F on the keyboard.

Fortunately, Side Effects is so cheap that you might as well buy it twice: one from amazon and another from apple ibooks!

Another approach is to closely examine my charts and data using the excel webapp on your PC or Mac.

Side Effects: The Economic Consequences of the Health Reform

Spending on health care has grown faster than the economy itself, even while the share of the population without health insurance was increasing. The Affordable Care Act (a.k.a., Obamacare) intends to reverse these trends, but in doing so has economic side effects. Businesses are complaining about the ACA's new tax and regulatory burdens, whereas supporters say that it is a long-overdue "shot in the arm" that will promote entrepreneurship and a "more rapid economic recovery."

Positive and negative tax effects of the ACA are carefully documented. The book offers a comprehensive market analysis of the law that arrives at conclusions as to effects on work hours, productivity, and national income. It shows what the ACA means for economic performance in the years ahead, and explains why forecasters have yet to acknowledge many of the economic forces that have been put in motion.

The book contains numerous facts and economic insights that have been unnoticed by both supporters and opponents. Anyone interested in economic performance over the next several years has to understand the contents of the Affordable Care Act from a labor market perspective and this book is so far the only comprehensive and user-friendly introduction to the topic.

Browse or buy the book now! Check acasideeffects.com in early September for numerous extras and bonus features.

Available now!

Spending on health care has grown faster than the economy itself, even while the share of the population without health insurance was increasing. The Affordable Care Act (a.k.a., Obamacare) intends to reverse these trends, but in doing so has economic side effects. Businesses are complaining about the ACA's new tax and regulatory burdens, whereas supporters say that it is a long-overdue "shot in the arm" that will promote entrepreneurship and a "more rapid economic recovery."

Positive and negative tax effects of the ACA are carefully documented. The book offers a comprehensive market analysis of the law that arrives at conclusions as to effects on work hours, productivity, and national income. It shows what the ACA means for economic performance in the years ahead, and explains why forecasters have yet to acknowledge many of the economic forces that have been put in motion.

The book contains numerous facts and economic insights that have been unnoticed by both supporters and opponents. Anyone interested in economic performance over the next several years has to understand the contents of the Affordable Care Act from a labor market perspective and this book is so far the only comprehensive and user-friendly introduction to the topic.

Browse or buy the book now! Check acasideeffects.com in early September for numerous extras and bonus features.

Recent economic growth

Average annualized growth of real GDP per capita (FRED series A939RX0Q048SBEA)

3.2% last quarter
0.2% last two quarters (i.e., 2013-Q4 through 2014-Q2)
1.1% last three quarters
1.7% last four quarters

Note that the 0.2% does not use any data from the "bad winter" (2014-Q1): it is just the annualized percentage difference between 2013-Q4 and 2014-Q2.

The Massive Tax Increase Hidden Inside Obamacare

The Massive Tax Increase Hidden Inside Obamacare

By Casey Mulligan

With this week's federal announcement that millions of middle- and low-income people are getting a surprisingly large number of taxpayer dollars attached to their participation in the Obamacare health plans, can we begin to take seriously the idea that the fiscal policies and regulations hidden in the Affordable Care Act are shrinking our economy?

Real GDP fell last quarter, but the conventional wisdom says that cold weather gets all of the blame. If we add the self-employed to payroll employment, we would see that nationwide employment fell last month for the first time in more than a year, but we are collectively ignoring that as a statistical aberration too.

At first glance it might appear that the Affordable Care Act helps people get access to health care and disproportionately benefits low-income households without many new taxes. By one estimate, the ACA's tax increases are less than 0.5 percent of gross domestic product, and less than several other hardly memorable tax increases of the postwar period. The White House suggested that health reform would largely pay for itself, without mentioning taxes that, individually or in combination, would have more than a "little effect" on the labor market.

Politicians and journalists use the term tax more narrowly than economists do, but the economic definition is needed to understand the economic effects of the ACA. Suppose, hypothetically, that the government provided a "universal" $2,000 health benefit to every person and paid for it with a tax, in the narrow sense of the word, of $4,000 per employee. Employees are half the population, so the employee taxes average $2,000 per person and are enough to pay for the universal benefit.

Now consider an alternative "targeted" approach that pays the $2,000 health benefit only to people who do not work, and gets the revenue from a $2,000 tax per employee. By excluding workers from the benefit, the targeted approach appears to spend and tax less: only $1,000 per person. But the economic result is the same because, in both systems, employees pay $2,000 more than they receive. In both systems, people who are not employed receive more than employed people do: in the universal system their lack of employment exempts them from a large tax whereas in the targeted system it exempts them from a smaller tax but also gives them access to a benefit that is withheld from workers.

Withholding benefits from people who work or earn is hardly different than telling them to pay a tax. For this reason, economists refer to benefits withheld as "implicit taxes." What really matters for labor market performance is the reward to working inclusive of implicit taxes, and not the amount of revenue delivered to the government treasury according to economically arbitrary distinctions between implicit taxes and other taxes. The targeted system gives the same economic results, including the economic harms from taxes, as the universal benefit system does but without the (politically ugly) appearance of bringing significant revenues to the government treasury.

The ACA resembles the targeted approach because it is full of implicit taxes. Many of them have remained hidden in the "fog of controversy" surrounding the law and their effects excluded from economic analyses of it. The chart below puts the ACA's new taxes in perspective of federal tax increases over the past seventy years. The taxes include federal personal income taxes (Form 1040, shown in pink), social insurance payroll taxes (gray), and various employment and implicit taxes (red).

The chart does not show revenue for the U.S. Treasury-that statistic is vulnerable to some of the arbitrary distinctions noted above-but instead shows the effect of various tax laws on the incentives for workers to earn more labor income rather than less as measured by a marginal labor income tax rate (by marginal labor income tax I mean the extra taxes paid, and subsidies forgone, as the result of working). During a period that included more than a dozen tax increases, the ACA is arguably the largest as a single piece of legislation, adding about six percentage points to the marginal tax rate faced, on average, by workers in the economy. The only way to cite larger marginal tax increases would be to combine multiple coincident laws, such as the Revenue Acts of 1950 and 1951 and the new payroll tax rate that went into effect in 1950. Even with these adjustments, the ACA is still the third largest marginal tax rate hike during the seventy years.

Another feature of the ACA that distinguishes it from other large marginal tax rate rises is that the former is, by law, entirely permanent whereas essentially the only other permanent ones shown in Figure 1.1 are the payroll tax rate changes.

Let's not be surprised that, as we implement a new law that taxes jobs and incomes, we are ending up with fewer jobs and less income.

Casey B. Mulligan is the author of The Redistribution Recession (2012) along with the forthcoming ebook Side Effects: The Economic Consequences of the Health Reform. Mulligan is also the recipient of the Manhattan Institute's 2014 Hayek Prize.  

Employment just went down

Please don't forget that the establishment survey excludes agricultural workers and many of the self-employed. The establishment survey has a lot going for it, but only for the part of the economy it covers. For anyone interested in the national economy, I recommend using the establishment survey plus unincorporated self-employed (from the household survey, seasonally adjusted) plus agricultural workers (also from the household survey, seasonally adjusted). See also the BLS on this matter.

One of the critiques of the household survey is that it is noisy month-to-month -- I agree. But my proposed augmentation of the establishment survey is not particularly noisy because the vast majority of its employment is from the establishment survey.

Changes from April 2014 to May 2014 (100s of workers):

+217 establishment survey
-213 unincorporated self-employed
-109 agricultural workers (excluding self-employed)
----------------------------------
-105 National employment change

[The average monthly change since December 2013 has been +152: just keeping up with population growth. The avg monthly change in 2013 was +171. This employment measure has increased 36 out of the past 40 months (going back to 2010, not counting this month). This month's change is 1.9 standard deviations below the average change since 2010.]
[2010 was the labor-market's low point by most employment measures. But unincorp self-employment has fallen another 567,000 since then. If you use the establishment survey, you miss that.]