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The Natural Rate Hypothesis: an Idea Past Its Sell-By Date NBER WORKING PAPER SERIES THE NATURAL RATE HYPOTHESIS: AN IDEA PAST ITS SELL-BY DATE Roger E.A. Farmer Working Paper 19267 http://www.nber.org/papers/w19267 NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138 July 2013 This paper was written while visiting the Bank of England for the year as a 2013 Senior Houblon Norman Fellow. I wish to thank Spencer Dale and the Trustees of the Houblon Norman Fund for providing me with this opportunity. I am also grateful to everyone at the Bank for making me feel so welcome and for their support and encouragement during my stay. Finally, I would like to thank Dan Nixon, Mark Cornelius and the entire editorial team at the Bank of England Quarterly Bulletin, as well as C. Roxanne Farmer, for their invaluable editorial suggestions and assistance. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and they do not represent those of the Bank or the Monetary Policy Committee. The views expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peer- reviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications. © 2013 by Roger E.A. Farmer. All rights reserved. Short sections of text, not to exceed two paragraphs, may be quoted without explicit permission provided that full credit, including © notice, is given to the source. The Natural Rate Hypothesis: An idea past its sell-by date Roger E.A. Farmer NBER Working Paper No. 19267 July 2013 JEL No. E0,E24,E52 ABSTRACT Central banks throughout the world predict inflation with new-Keynesian models where, after a shock, the unemployment rate returns to its so called "natural rate". That assumption is called the Natural Rate Hypothesis (NRH). This paper reviews a body of work, published over the last decade, which is critical of the NRH. I argue that the NRH does not hold in the data and I provide an alternative paradigm that explains why it does not hold. I replace the NRH with the assumption that the animal spirits of investors are a fundamental of the economy and I show how to operationalize that idea by constructing an empirical model that outperforms the new-Keynesian Phillips curve. I model animal spirits with a new fundamental that I call the belief function. Roger E.A. Farmer UCLA Department of Economics Box 951477 Los Angeles, CA 90095-1477 and NBER [email protected] 2 Writing in 1936, following a U.S. stock market Six years after the onset of the Great Recession, collapse and an unemployment rate in excess of Western economies are still underperforming by 20%, Keynes provided a different vision. He saw historical standards. There have been calls from high persistent unemployment as a different kind prominent academics, politicians and policy of steady state equilibrium. makers for a rethink of the foundations of macroeconomics. But what would that mean? This Keynes’ view was rejected by his followers, article explains how a radical restructuring of notably Paul Samuelson (1955). In the third macroeconomic theory, based on models of edition of his undergraduate textbook, Samuelson multiple equilibria, can help us to understand the replaced Keynes’ notion, of high unemployment crisis. as an equilibrium, with a new idea: the neo- classical synthesis.3 According to that idea, the To make my case, I summarize and synthesize Keynesian high unemployment equilibrium is only results from my recent books and academic temporary. It applies in the short run, when prices articles. This body of work (Farmer 2002, 2006, and wages are sticky, but in the long run, when all 2008, 2010a,b 2012a, 2013a, 2014) reconciles wages and prices have had time to adjust, the Keynesian and classical ideas in a new way. economy reverts to a classical equilibrium with full Instead of assuming prices are sticky, I develop a employment. new paradigm to explain why high unemployment persists. Soon after Samuelson introduced the neo- classical synthesis, the theory was provided with In my work, I use search theory to provide a new empirical support. In an important 1958 article, A. foundation to Keynesian economics. Unlike William Phillips demonstrated that there had been theories based on Samuelson’s neo-classical a structurally stable relationship between synthesis, I explain why the data do not display a unemployment and the rate of change of money natural rate of unemployment. wages in a century of U.K. data. His article was I replace the Natural Rate Hypothesis with the influential because it filled a theoretical hole in assumption that the animal spirits of investors are Keynesian theory. Box 1 shows the original a fundamental of the economy and I show how to Phillips curve and the methodology used to operationalize that idea by constructing an construct it. empirical model that outperforms the new- Keynesians and monetarists Keynesian Phillips curve. I model animal spirits with a new fundamental that I call the belief Milton Friedman is a central figure in the function. development of macroeconomics in the latter part of the twentieth century. In his1948 article, “A A brief history of macroeconomic Monetary and Fiscal Framework for Economic thought Stability”, he developed the thesis that policy makers should provide a stable framework in From Hume to Phillips which private agents can operate. Classical economists from David Hume, through Active monetary and fiscal policy has no role in Adam Smith, David Ricardo and John Maynard Friedman’s analysis since he assumed that Keynes’ contemporary, Arthur Pigou, viewed the 1 markets work well to allocate resources efficiently economy as a self-regulating mechanism. In to competing ends.4 Because of the central role of modern parlance the classical vision was of an the money supply in Friedman’s thought, his ideas economy with a unique, stable, steady-state are known as monetarism. equilibrium. In 1970, Friedman explained the theoretical Smith’s idea of the ‘invisible hand’ was formalized framework that guided his policy advice. By that in the nineteenth century by Léon Walras (1874) time, the Phillips curve had appeared in print and and Vilfredo Pareto (1896). They envisaged an economic system that today we would describe as 2 Pareto Efficient. time spent in paid employment, to make any single person better off without making some other person worse off. 3 For a discussion of the influence of Samuelson’s textbook on economic thought, see the enlightening piece by Pearce and Hoover (1995). 1 Hume (1742), Smith (1776), Ricardo (1817), Pigou (1928). 2 In the language of modern general equilibrium theory, an 4 For a competing view of why markets do not work well, see the equilibrium is Pareto Efficient if an omniscient social planner could recent piece by Farmer, Nourry and Venditti (2012), which won not rearrange the allocation of goods, including the allocation of the inaugural 2013 Maurice Allais Prize in Economic Science. 3 Box 1: Estimating the first Phillips curve Phillips estimated the first Phillips curve using For each of the six and half cycles, the data for U.K. data on wage inflation and unemployment unemployment and wage inflation for each region from 1861 through 1957. were averaged. That procedure led to six values for average wage inflation and average unemployment When unemployment was high, he argued that to which Phillips fit a nonlinear equation. By there was an excess supply of labour that put grouping data in this way, he hoped to remove the downward pressure on money wages. When effects of changing inflation and unemployment on unemployment was low, he argued that there was the steady state relationship. an excess demand for labour, leading to upward pressure on money wages. The resulting curve connecting unemployment and wage inflation proved to be remarkably resilient. To substantiate these claims, he separated his Phillips showed that raw data for each of the six data into three sub-periods and demonstrated and half cycles in the pre-WWI period lay closely that the same relationship held in all three of around a curve that had been fit to cycle averaged them. Phillips’ first sub-period began in 1861 and data. ended in 1913 with the onset of WWI. The second contained data for the interwar period and Chart 2, reproduced from Phillips’ original article, the third began in 1948 and ended in 1957. The illustrates the data for 1948 to 1957. Notice how Phillips curve was estimated on data from the first closely the 1950s data conforms to the pre WWI sub-sample using an averaging method to curve. remove the influence of changing unemployment on the steady state relationship that he hoped to Chart 2: Fitting post-WWII data to the pre uncover. WWI Phillips curve Phillips divided the raw data into six groups based on where an observation occurred over the business cycle. He grouped the pre-WWI data into six and a half cycles and he assigned the unemployment data for each cycle to one of six regions; the peak, the trough and four intermediate regions (see Chart 1). Chart 1: How Phillips grouped the pre- WWI Data 0% Unem 1 (peak) 2% 2 ployment rate 3% 3 4% 4 Source: Phillips (1958) Used by permission. 5% 5 Phillips’ contemporaries saw the conformity of data 7% from the 1950s, with a curve estimated from nineteenth century data, as evidence that the 6 (trough) Phillips curve was a fundamental structural relationship that characterizes the wage adjustment 11% process. The stability of the Phillips curve in a hundred years of data made them sit up and pay attention.
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