Demographics and Macroeconomics – Part 2 (Wonkish)

By Claus Vistesen, on November 23rd, 2010

I don’t suspect anyone remember part 1 of this series so if you want to refresh your memory, you can have a look here. In that note, I treated some of the more theoretical issues in the form of how demographics might affect long run growth as well as open economy dynamics. In particular, I discussed the broad tenets of the life cycle framework and how it relates to savings and investment behavior as a function of ageing. In particular, I discussed where I think there was room for improvement and further study.

So, in this one I would that I would look at an all together more practical topic in the form of asset demand and prices as a function of demographics. Again, this is a substantial area in the finance and macroeconomic literature and I will not give a detailed literary review here. Besides, if you want to move straight to investment and portfolio implications this piece by Alicia Damley and this piece by Ed Dolan are really spot on in terms of what you need to think about. Basically, you want to buy the young guns and sell the old farts and the key to obtaining this insight is to remove the focus from population size to population structure (age structure). I have been harping about this since this blog’s inception 5 years ago, I am doing a PhD about it, so it is with pleasure that I see the discourse hitting the tapes of Seeking Alpha which indicates that it is grabbing hold of other people than those stuck in the university ivory tower.

In this sense, this is hardly a new story . Emerging markets represent the main investment story in a post Lehman context. Everyone wants to buy India, China (although she is quite different), and Brazil and as a result of a myriad of ETFs and other types of market trackers, you don’t need to know your way around the streets of Bangalore to gain exposure to the Indian growth story.

This is a turkey shoot then. And I largely agree with the main thrust of the argument.

The real maturing of the emerging world which began some 10-12 years ago and which will continue for the next decades is undeniably a force of good for savers and investors and the real question is whether it is too good, and thus whether there will end up being too much capital chasing too little yield. In order to understand this link, you would need the second part of the equation (see part 1) and understand how demographics affect capital flows and the transfer of savings between economies as a function of demographics.

In this note I will talk about the idea of a life course but in the way that it is traditionally narrated. As such, the life course is a sociological theory which describes phases of life and in this sense it is more topical than the idea of a life cycle which only describes the flow of investment and savings. Indeed, in finance and economics you only hear about the life cycle even if scholars who investigate for example the dynamics of house prices as a function of demographics essentially are deploying a life course framework.

What is the Life Course then?

Well, Wikipedia does a good job of explaining it for the layman and this small snippet also captures the essence quite well especially

In particular, it [Life Course Theory] directs attention to the powerful connection between individual lives and the historical and socioeconomic context in which these lives unfold. As a concept, a life course is defined as “a sequence of socially defined events and roles that the individual enacts over time” (Giele and Elder 1998, p. 22). These events and roles do not necessarily proceed in a given sequence, but rather constitute the sum total of the person’s actual experience. Thus the concept of life course implies age-differentiated social phenomena distinct from uniform life-cycle stages and the life span.

The only mental leap you need to perform here is to replace socially defined events with economically defined events and you have yourself a working model. Now, if the finance geeks out there think that I am turning soft and if the sociologists believe that I am reducing their complicated theory of human lives into numbers and equations, both groups have my symaphaties.

Yet, this is a part of my master plan to elevate ageing and the change in age structure to the ultimate unit of analysis on a macroeconomic level. And in order to do this, we need more than merely the life cycle or the life course. We need them both. In fact, only by fusing the two will be able to develop a framework which is rich enough to deal with the complexities of ageing and macroeconomics. Indeed, I am betting a good deal of my academic oevure on this.
Consequently, if a socially defined event of interest to a sociologist or demographer might be the age of marriage, age of first child birth, age of first encounter with alcohol, age of sexual debut etc, then an economically defined event be something along the lines of age of maxmimum borrowing relative to asset value, age of purchase of first home, purchase of durables as a function of age as well as of course, the main topic in the financial literature as it currently stands; portfolio choice as a function of age (stocks and bonds basically, but you can vary the portfolio here as much as you like, at least in principle).
So, this inclusion of life course into the general thinking of macroeconomics is crucial and even though economists always talk about the life cycle, they are often implicitly assuming a life course perspective.
In the end, I will keep it short here.
There is a myriad of sources on aging and asset prices and demand in general. The main man in the world of economics and finance is James Poterba from MIT (just check list of papers) and I would emphasize in particular the strand of literature that deals with housing and demographics (I have a paper coming here).


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Five Questions on Asset Prices and Monetary Policy

By Ajay Shah, on December 28th, 2009

Howard Davies was a deputy governor of the Bank of England, and the first head of the UK FSA. He is one of the world’s leading thinkers on financial regulation and monetary policy, and one of the people who combines skills in both finance and monetary economics. In a recent article, he focuses on the five interesting questions about central banks and asset prices. Everyone interested in monetary policy today needs to ask themselves these five questions.

Q1: Should central banks target asset prices?

Davies points out that the consensus view is that central banks should remain focused on inflation targeting and not target asset prices.

However, pretty much everyone would agree that information from the world around us, about asset prices, is useful for forecasting inflation and output, and should be used in figuring out what values for output and inflation we put into our Taylor rules (whatever they might be).

So it seems that on this question, there is consensus: Asset prices are (and have always been) useful inputs in monetary policy formulation, but monetary policy should continue to do inflation targeting and not asset price targeting.

Q2: Should the measure of inflation targeted include an element of asset price, and particularly house price inflation?

Any reasonable CPI must have house rent in it, and through this, a boom in house prices and thus rents will get reflected in the CPI. This would give one more channel through which asset prices would directly influence a traditional inflation-targeting central bank.

Q3: Is it possible to identify serious asset price misalignments, and are they of legitimate concern to monetary policy-makers?

This is controversial territory. Some economists believe it is possible to ask central banks to make a call on when asset prices are misaligned.

I am personally skeptical about the extent to which this is possible. It is always easy to look back, ex-post, and say that it was obvious that US house prices were way off in 2006. But how many of the people who say this today were shorting US housing then?

Making a call about asset price fluctuations is hard even for a well motivated hedge fund manager. It is doubly hard in the public sector given the peculiar combination of skills and incentives that are found within central banks. The people with real skill in these things are unlikely to choose to work in a central bank; years spent in a central bank do not hone skills at market timing; the public will be very irritated if a central bank calls wrong.

So overall, I’m skeptical about the extent to which central banks (past or future) can usefully make calls about when asset prices are out of whack.

Q4: Even if we can identify misalignments, and believe that some price adjustment is bound to occur, is it right to use interest rates to try to moderate the expansion?

Even if you knew that asset prices were grossly wrong, interest rates seem to be a very blunt tool, which inflict collateral damage all around the economy. Davies quotes Mervyn King who said two months ago: Diverting monetary policy from its goal of price stability risks making the economy less stable and the financial system no more so.

Q5: Should we try to find and use mechanisms other than interest rates to moderate extravagant credit expansion and associated asset price bubbles?

I think there is a good case for building some kinds of counter-cyclicality into financial regulation. But operationalising this is hard.

It should be feasible for financial regulators to have three manuals which govern boom times, normal times, and recessions. Full public disclosure of these three manuals is, of course essential, to avoid the usual issues of transparency and consistency. The question is: When would you flip from one manual to another?

Doing this based on asset prices runs into the difficulties articulated above. How is a civil servant to know when asset prices are in a boom or a bust?

Doing it based on business cycle conditions is more objective and feasible. It should be possible to setup indicators like Eurocoin which give low latency information about a coincident indicator. This could be used to drive rules about when we go into each of the three manuals. I personally think this would be useful.

Such efforts can be rationalised on the narrow ground that we seek to reduce the extent to which finance is a source of pro-cyclicality in the economy. If this is done right, it would reduce the amount of heavy lifting that monetary and fiscal policy have to do by way of stabilisation.

You don’t have to have a `financial markets are irrational’ view to support this. All you have to believe is that the existing structures of financial regulation are a source of pro-cyclicality. If that much is agreed, then there is a case for changing the framework of financial regulation so as to reduce the extent to which this is the case.

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