Tag: Fiscal Policy

Will the United States Experience a Sustained Boom in the Growth Rate of Labor Productivity?

Blue Planet Studio/Shutterstock

Recent articles in the business press have discussed the possibility that the U.S. economy is entering a period of higher growth in labor productivity:

“Fed’s Goolsbee Says Strong Hiring Hints at Productivity Growth Burst” (link)

“US Productivity Is on the Upswing Again. Will AI Supercharge It?” (link)

“Can America Turn a Productivity Boomlet Into a Boom?” (link)

In Macroeconomics, Chapter 16, Section 16.7 (Economics, Chapter 26, Section 26.7), we highlighted  the role of growth in labor productivity in explaining the growth rate of real GDP using the following equations. First, an identity:

Real GDP = Number of hours worked x (Real GDP/Number of hours worked),

where (Real GDP/Number of hours worked) is labor productivity.

And because an equation in which variables are multiplied together is equal to an equation in which the growth rates of these variables are added together, we have:

Growth rate of real GDP = Growth rate of hours worked + Growth rate of labor productivity

From 1950 to 2023, real GDP grew at annual average rate of 3.1 percent. In recent years, real GDP has been growing more slowly. For example, it grew at a rate of only 2.0 percent from 2000 to 2023. In February 2024, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) forecasts that real GDP would grow at 2.0 percent from 2024 to 2034. Although the difference between a growth rate of 3.1 percent and a growth rate of 2.0 percent may seem small, if real GDP were to return to growing at 3.1 percent per year, it would be $3.3 trillion larger in 2034 than if it grows at 2.0 percent per year. The additional $3.3 trillion in real GDP would result in higher incomes for U.S. residents and would make it easier for the federal government to reduce the size of the federal budget deficit and to better fund programs such as Social Security and Medicare. (We discuss the issues concerning the federal government’s budget deficit in this earlier blog post.)

Why has growth in real GDP slowed from a 3.1 percent rate to a 2.0 percent rate? The two expressions on the right-hand side of the equation for growth in real GDP—the growth in hours worked and the growth in labor productivity—have both slowed. Slowing population growth and a decline in the average number of hours worked per worker have resulted in the growth rate of hours worked to slow substantially from a rate of 2.0 percent per year from 1950 to 2023 to a forecast rate of only 0.4 percent per year from 2024 to 2034.

Falling birthrates explains most of the decline in population growth. Although lower birthrates have been partially offset by higher levels of immigration in recent years, it seems unlikely that birthrates will increase much even in the long run and levels of immigration also seem unlikely to increase substantially in the future. Therefore, for the growth rate of real GDP to increase significantly requires increases in the rate of growth of labor productivity.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) publishes quarterly data on labor productivity. (Note that the BLS series is for labor productivity in the nonfarm business sector rather than for the whole economy. Output of the nonfarm business sector excludes output by government, nonprofit businesses, and households. Over long periods, growth in real GDP per hour worked and growth in real output of the nonfarm business sector per hour worked have similar trends.) The following figure is taken from the BLS report “Productivty and Costs,” which was released on February 1, 2024.

Note that the growth in labor productivity increased during the last three quarters of 2023, whether we measure the growth rate as the percentage change from the same quarter in the previous year or as growth in a particular quarter expressed as anual rate. It’s this increase in labor productivity during 2023 that has led to speculation that labor productivity might be entering a period of higher growth. The following figure shows labor productivity growth, measured as the percentage change from the same quarter in the previous year for the whole period from 1950 to 2023.

The figure indicates that labor productivity has fluctuated substantially over this period. We can note, in particular, productivity growth during two periods: First, from 2011 to 2018, labor productivity grew at the very slow rate of 0.9 percent per year. Some of this slowdown reflected the slow recovery of the U.S. economy from the Great Recession of 2007-2009, but the slowdown persisted long enough to cause concern that the U.S. economy might be entering a period of stagnation or very slow growth.

Second, from 2019 through 2023, labor productivity went through very large swings. Labor productivity experienced strong growth during 2019, then, as the Covid-19 pandemic began affecting the U.S. economy, labor productivity soared through the first half of 2021 before declining for five consecutive quarters from the first quarter of 2022 through the first quarter of 2023—the first time productivity had fallen for that long a period since the BLS first began collecting the data. Although these swings were particularly large, the figure shows that during and in the immediate aftermath of recessions labor productivity typically fluctuates dramatically. The reason for the fluctuations is that firms can be slow to lay workers off at the beginning of a recession—which causes labor productivity to fall—and slow to hire workers back during the beginning of an economy recovery—which causes labor productivity to rise. 

Does the recent increase in labor productivity growth represent a trend? Labor productivity, measured as the percentage change since the same quarter in the previous year, was 2.7 percent during the fourth quarter of 2023—higher than in any quarter since the first quarter of 2021. Measured as the percentage change from the previous quarter at an annual rate, labor productivity grew at a very high average rate of 3.9 during the last three quarters of 2023. It’s this high rate that some observers are pointing to when they wonder whether growth in labor productivity is on an upward trend.

As with any other economic data, you should use caution in interpreting changes in labor productivity over a short period. The productivity data may be subject to large revisions as the two underlying series—real output and hours worked—are revised in coming months. In addition, it’s not clear why the growth rate of labor productivity would be increasing in the long run. The most common reasons advanced are: 1) the productivity gains from the increase in the number of people working from home since the pandemic, 2) businesses’ increased use of artificial intelligence (AI), and 3) potential efficiencies that businesses discovered as they were forced to operate with a shortage of workers during and after the pandemic.

To this point it’s difficult to evaluate the long-run effects of any of these factors. Wconomists and business managers haven’t yet reached a consensus on whether working from home increases or decreases productivity. (The debate is summarized in this National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper, written by Jose Maria Barrero of Instituto Tecnologico Autonomo de Mexico, and Steven Davis and Nicholas Bloom of Stanford. You may need to access the paper through your university library.)

Many economists believe that AI is a general purpose technology (GPT), which means that it may have broad effects throughout the economy. But to this point, AI hasn’t been adopted widely enough to be a plausible cause of an increase in labor productivity. In addition, as Erik Brynjolfsson and Daniel Rock of MIT and Chad Syverson of the University of Chicago argue in this paper, the introduction of a GPT may initially cause productivity to fall as firms attempt to use an unfamiliar technology. The third reason—efficiency gains resulting from the pandemic—is to this point mainly anecdotal. There are many cases of businesses that discovered efficiencies during and immediately after Covid as they struggled to operate with a smaller workforce, but we don’t yet know whether these cases are sufficiently common to have had a noticeable effect on labor productivity.

So, we’re left with the conclusion that if the high labor productivity growth rates of 2023 can be maintained, the growth rate of real GDP will correspondingly increase more than most economists are expecting. But it’s too early to know whether recent high rates of labor productivty growth are sustainable.

What Explains the Surprising Surge in the Federal Budget Deficit?

Figure from CBO’s monthly budget report.

During 2023, GDP and employment have continued to expand. Between the second quarter of 2022 and the second quarter of 2023, nominal GDP increased by 6.1 percent. From July 2022 to July 2023, total employment increased by 3.3 million as measured by the establishment (or payroll) survey and by 3.0 as measured by the household survey. (In this post, we discuss the differences between the employment measures in the two surveys.)

We would expect that with an expanding economy, federal tax revenues would rise and federal expenditures on unemployment insurance and other transfer programs would decline, reducing the federal budget deficit. (We discuss the effects of the business cycle on the federal budget deficit in Macroeconomics, Chapter 16, Section 16.6, Economics, Chapter 26, Section 26.6, and Essentials of Economics, Chapter 18, Section 18.6.) In fact, though, as the figure from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) at the top of this post shows, the federal budget deficit actually increased substantially during 2023 in comparison with 2022. The federal budget deficit from the beginning of government’s fiscal year on October 1, 2022 through July 2023 was $1,617 billion, more than double the $726 billion deficit during the same period in fiscal 2022.

The following figure from an article in the Washington Post uses data from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget to illustrate changes in the federal budget deficit in recent years. The figure shows the sharp decline in the federal budget deficit in 2022 as the economic recovery from the Covid–19 pandemic increased federal tax receipts and reduced federal expenditures as emergency spending programs ended. Given the continuing economic recovery, the surge in the deficit during 2023 was unexpected.

As the following figure shows, using CBO data, federal receipts—mainly taxes—are 10 percent lower this year than last year, and federal outlays—including transfer payments—are 11 percent higher. For receipts to fall and outlays to increase during an economic expansion is very unusual. As an article in the Wall Street Journal put it: “Something strange is happening with the federal budget this year.”

Note: The values on the vertical axis are in billions of dollars.

The following figure shows a breakdown of the decline in federal receipts. While corporate taxes and payroll taxes (primarily used to fund the Social Security and Medicare systems) increased, personal income tax receipts fell by 20 percent, and “other receipts” fell by 37 percent. The decline in other receipts is largely the result of a decline in payments from the Federal Reserve to the U.S. Treasury from $99 billion in 2022 to $1 billion in 2023. As we discuss in Macroeconomics, Chapter 17, Section 17.4 (Economics, Chapter 27, Section 27.4), Congress intended the Federal Reserve to be independent of the rest of the government. Unlike other federal agencies and departments, the Fed is self-financing rather than being financed by Congressional appropriations. Typically, the Fed makes a profit because the interest it earns on its holdings of Treasury securities is more than the interest it pays banks on their reserve deposits. After paying its operating costs, the Fed pays the rest of its profit to the Treasury. But as the Fed increased its target for the federal funds rate beginning in March 2022, it also increased the interest rate it pays banks on their reserve deposits. Because most of the securities it holds pay low interest rates, the Fed has begun running a deficit, reducing the payments it makes to the Treasury.

Note: The values on the vertical axis are in billions of dollars.

The reasons for the sharp decline in individual income taxes are less clear. The decline was in the “nonwithheld category” of individual income taxes; federal income taxes withheld from worker paychecks increased. People who are self-employed or who receive substantial income from sources such as capital gains from selling stocks, make quarterly estimated income tax payments. It’s these types of personal income taxes that have been unexpectedly low. Accordingly, smaller capital gains may be one explanation for the shortfall in federal revenues, but a more complete explanation won’t be possible until more data become available later in the year.

The following figure shows the categories of federal outlays that have increased the most from 2022 to 2023. The largest increase is in spending on Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, with spending on Social Security alone increasing by $111 billion. This increase is due partly to an increase in the number of retired workers receiving benefits and partly to the sharp rise in inflation, because Social Security is indexed to changes in the consumer price index (CPI). Spending on Medicare increased by $66 billion or a surprisingly large 18 percent. Interest payments on the public debt (also called the federal government debt or the national debt) increased by $146 billion or 34 percent because interest rates on newly issued Treasury securities rose as nominal interest rates adjusted to the increase in inflation and because the public debt had increased significantly as a result of the large budget deficits of 2020 and 2021. The increase in spending by the Department of Education reflects the effects of the changes the Biden administration made to student loans eligible for the income-driven repayment plan. (We discuss the income-driven repayment plan for student loans in this blog post.)

Note: The values on the vertical axis are in billions of dollars.

The surge in federal government outlays occurred despite a $120 billion decline in refundable tax credits, largely due to the expiration of the expansion of the child tax credit Congress enacted during the pandemic, a $98 billion decline in Treasury payments to state and local governments to help offset the financial effects of the pandemic, and $59 billion decline in federal payments to hospitals and other medical facilities to offset increased costs due to the pandemic.

In this blog post from February, we discussed the challenges posed to Congress and the president by the CBO’s forecasts of rising federal budget deficits and corresponding increases in the federal government’s debt. The unexpected expansion in the size of the federal budget deficit for the current fiscal year significantly adds to the task of putting the federal government’s finances on a sound basis.

Inflation, Supply Chain Disruptions, and the Peculiar Process of Purchasing a Car

Photo from the Wall Street Journal.

Inflation as measured by the percentage change in the consumer price index (CPI) from the same month in the previous year was 7.9 percent in February 2022, the highest rate since January 1982—near the end of the Great Inflation that began in the late 1960s. The following figure shows inflation in the new motor vehicle component of the CPI.  The 12.4 percent increase in new car prices was the largest since April 1975.

The increase in new car prices was being driven partly by increases in aggregate demand resulting from the highly expansionary monetary and fiscal policies enacted in response to the economic disruptions caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, and partly from shortages of semiconductors and some other car components, which reduced the supply of new cars.

As the following figure shows, inflation in used car prices was even greater. With the exception of June and July of 2021, the 41.2 percent increase in used car prices in February 2022 was the largest since the Bureau of Labor Statistics began publishing these data in 1954. 

Because used cars are a substitute of new cars, rising prices of new cars caused an increase in demand for used cars. In addition, the supply of used cars was reduced because car rental firms, such as Enterprise and Hertz, had purchased fewer new cars during the worst of the pandemic and so had fewer used cars to sell to used car dealers. Increased demand and reduced supply resulted in the sharp increase in the price of used cars.

Another factor increasing the prices consumers were paying for cars was a reduction in bargaining—or haggling—over car prices.  Traditionally, most goods and services are sold at a fixed price. For example, some buying a refrigerator usually pays the posted price charged by Best Buy, Lowes, or another retailer. But houses and cars have been an exception, with buyers often negotiating prices that are lower than the seller was asking.

In the case of automobiles, by federal law, the price of a new car has to be posted on the car’s window. The posted price is called the Manufacturer’s Suggested Retail Price (MSRP), often referred to as the sticker price.  Typically, the sticker price represents a ceiling on what a consumer is likely to pay, with many—but not all—buyers negotiating for a lower price. Some people dislike the idea of bargaining over the price of a car, particularly if they get drawn into long negotiations at a car dealership. These buyers are likely to pay the sticker price or something very close to it.

As a result, car dealers have an opportunity to practice price discrimination:  They charge buyers whose demand for cars is more price elastic lower prices and buyers whose demand is less price elastic higher prices. The car dealers are able to separate the two groups on the basis of the buyers willingness to haggle over the price of a car. (We discuss price discrimination in Microeconomics and Economics, Chapter 15, Section 15.5.)  Prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, the ability of car dealers to practice this form of price discrimination had been eroded by the availability of online car buying services, such as Consumer Reports’ “Build & Buy Service,” which allow buyers to compare competing price offers from local car dealers. There aren’t sufficient data to determine whether using an online buying service results in prices as low as those obtained by buyers willing to haggle over price face-to-face with salespeople in dealerships.

In any event, in 2022 most car buyers were faced with a different situation: Rather than serving as a ceiling on the price, the MSRP, had become a floor. That is, many buyers found that given the reduced supply of new cars, they had to pay more than the MSRP. As one buyer quoted in a Wall Street Journal article put it: “The rules have changed so dramatically…. [T]he dealer’s position is ‘This is kind of a take-it-or-leave-it proposition.’” According to the website Edmunds.com, in January 2021, only about 3 percent of cars were sold in the United States for prices above MSRP, but in January 2022, 82 percent were.

Car manufacturers are opposed to dealers charging prices higher than the MSRP, fearing that doing so will damage the car’s brand. But car manufacturers don’t own the dealerships that sell their cars. The dealerships are independently owned businesses, a situation that dates back to the beginning of the car industry in the early 1900s. Early automobile manufacturers, such as Henry Ford, couldn’t raise sufficient funds to buy and operate a nationwide network of car dealerships. The manufacturers often even had trouble financing the working capital—or the funds used to finance the daily operations of the firm—to buy components from suppliers, pay workers, and cover the other costs of manufacturing automobiles.

The manufacturers solved both problems by relying on a network of independent dealerships that would be given franchises to be the exclusive sellers of a manufacturer’s brand of cars in a given area. The local businesspeople who owned the dealerships raised funds locally, often from commercial banks. Manufacturers generally paid their suppliers 30 to 90 days after receiving shipments of components, while requiring their dealers to pay a deposit on the cars they ordered and to pay the balance due at the time the cars were delivered to the dealers. One historian of the automobile industry described the process:

The great demand for automobiles and the large profits available for [dealers], in the early days of the industry … enabled the producers to exact substantial advance deposits of cash for all orders and to require cash payment upon delivery of the vehicles ….  The suppliers of parts and materials, on the other hand, extended book-account credit of thirty to ninety days. Thus the automobile producer had a month or more in which to assemble and sell his vehicles before the bills from suppliers became due; and much of his labor costs could be paid from dealers’ deposits.

The franchise system had some drawbacks for car manufacturers, however. A car dealership benefits from the reputation of the manufacturer whose cars it sells, but it has an incentive to free ride on that reputation. That is, if a local dealer can take an action—such as selling cars above the MSRP—that raises its profit, it has an incentive to do so even if the action damages the reputation of Ford, General Motors, or whichever firm’s cars the dealer is selling.  Car manufacturers have long been aware of the problem of car dealers free riding on the manufacturer’s reputation. For instance, in the 1920s, Ford sent so-called road men to inspect Ford dealers to check that they had clean, well-lighted showrooms and competent repair shops in order to make sure the dealerships weren’t damaging Ford’s brand.

As we discuss in Microeconomics and Economics, Chapter 10, Section 10.3, consumers often believe it’s unfair of a firm to raise prices—such as a hardware store raising the prices of shovels after a snowstorm—when the increases aren’t the result of increases in the firm’s costs. Knowing that many consumers have this view, car manufacturers in 2022 wanted their dealers not to sell cars for prices above the MSRP. As an article in the Wall Street Journal put it: “Historically, car companies have said they disapprove of their dealers charging above MSRP, saying it can reflect poorly on the brand and alienate customers.”

But the car manufacturers ran into another consequence of the franchise system. Using a franchise system rather than selling cars through manufacturer owned dealerships means that there are thousands of independent car dealers in the United States. The number of dealers makes them an effective lobbying force with state governments. As a result, most states have passed state franchise laws that limit the ability of car manufacturers to control the actions of their dealers and sometimes prohibit car manufacturers from selling cars directly to consumers. Although Tesla has attained the right in some states to sell directly to consumers without using franchised dealers, Ford, General Motors, and other manufacturers still rely exclusively on dealers. The result is that car manufacturers can’t legally set the prices that their dealerships charge. 

Will the situation of most people paying the sticker price—or more—for cars persist after the current supply chain problems are resolved? AutoNation is the largest chain of car dealerships in the United States. Recently, Mike Manley, the firm’s CEO, argued that the substantial discounts from the sticker price that were common before the pandemic are a thing of the past. He argued that car manufacturers were likely to keep production of new cars more closely in balance with consumer demand, reducing the number of cars dealers keep in inventory on their lots: “We will not return to excessively high inventory levels that depress new-vehicle margins.” 

Only time will tell whether the situation facing car buyers in 2022 of having to pay prices above the MSRP will persist. 

Sources: Mike Colias  and Nora Eckert, “A New Brand of Sticker Shock Hits the Car Market,” Wall Street Journal, February 26, 2022; Nora Eckert and Mike Colias, “Ford and GM Warn Dealers to Stop Charging So Much for New Cars,” Wall Street Journal, February 9, 2022; Gabrielle Coppola, “Car Discounts Aren’t Coming Back After Pandemic, AutoNation Says,” bloomberg.com, February 9, 2022; cr.org/buildandbuy; Lawrence H. Seltzer, A Financial History of the American Automobile Industry, Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1928; and Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.

Glenn’s Opinion Column on the Economics of an Increase in Defense Spending

Graphic from the Wall Street Journal.

Glenn published the following opinion column in the Wall Street Journal. Link here and full text below.

NATO Needs More Guns and Less Butter

Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine has challenged Western assumptions about security, economics and the postwar world order. In Europe and the U.S., public finances have long favored social spending over public goods such as defense. While President Biden doubled down on his proposal to increase social spending during his State of the Union address, Russia’s aggression highlights the shortcomings of this model. Western democracies now face a more uncertain and dangerous world than they did two weeks ago. Navigating it will require significantly higher levels of defense and security spending.

But change will be difficult, and the magnitude of what needs to be done is sobering. The U.S. currently spends 3.2% of gross domestic product on defense—roughly half of Cold War spending levels relative to GDP. An increase in spending of even 1% of GDP would amount to about $210 billion. That’s about 5% of the total federal spending level using a 2019 pre-Covid baseline. While Covid spending was large, it was transitory. Defense outlays would be much longer-lasting, an insurance premium or transaction cost for dealing with a more dangerous world.

The U.S. is not alone. Germany’s announcement of €100 billion in additional defense spending this year represents an increase of just over 0.25% of GDP, leaving Berlin still under the 2% commitment agreed to by North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies. Increasing Europe’s defense spending merely to the agreed-on level would require significant outlays. Such spending increases would occur against the backdrop of elevated public debt relative to GDP, brought on in part by heightened borrowing during the Covid pandemic and the earlier global financial crisis. High levels of public debt make it unlikely that countries will want to pay to increase their defense spending with new borrowing.

Paying for higher levels of defense spending will force most governments either to raise taxes or cut spending. Tax increases raise risks to growth. The larger non-U.S. NATO economies are already taxed to the hilt. Tax revenue relative to the size of the economy in France (45%), Germany (38%), Canada (34%) and the U.K. (32%) doesn’t leave much room to tax more without depressing economic activity. The U.S. has a lower tax share of GDP—about 17.5% at the federal level and 25.5% in total—but its patchwork quilt of income and payroll taxes makes tax increases more costly by distorting household and business decisions about consumption and investment.

A significant tax increase in the U.S. would need to be accompanied by fundamental tax reform, dialing back income taxes (as with the 2017 reduction in corporate tax rates) and increasing reliance on consumption taxes. A broad-based consumption tax could be implemented by imposing a tax at the business level on revenue minus purchases from other firms (a “subtraction method” value-added tax). Alternatively, the tax system could impose a broad-based wage and business cash-flow tax, with a progressive wage surtax on high earners. These consumption-tax alternatives would be efficient and equitable in a revenue-neutral tax reform. And they are crucial in avoiding decreases in savings, investment and entrepreneurship that accompany a tax increase.

Since the 1960s, spending on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid has come to dominate the federal budget. Outlays for these programs have almost doubled since then as a share of GDP to 10.2% today, and the Congressional Budget Office projects they will consume about another 5% of GDP annually by 2040. Spending offsets to accommodate higher defense spending would surely require slowing the growth in social-insurance spending. As with tax increases, there are trade-offs. It is possible to slow the growth of this spending while preserving access to such support for lower-income Americans. Accomplishing that will require focusing net taxpayer subsidies on lower-income Americans, along with undertaking market-oriented health reforms. Such changes require serious attention.

The U.S. and its NATO allies will face a challenging set of economic trade-offs and political realities in achieving higher defense spending. The challenge will be exacerbated by additional private investment needs in a more dangerous world of investment risks, skepticism about globalization, and cybersecurity threats. 

In the U.S., the failure of the 2010 Simpson-Bowles Commission’s proposed spending and tax reforms to spark a serious discussion is a warning sign. So, too, is the antipathy of Democratic and Republican officials alike toward creating the fiscal space necessary to accommodate greater defense spending. Such challenges don’t cause threats to vanish. They require leadership—now.

New 1/25/22 Podcast – Authors Glenn Hubbard & Tony O’Brien discuss inflation, inflation, inflation.

Authors Glenn Hubbard and Tony O’Brien as they talk about the leading economic issue of early 2022 – inflation! They discuss the resurgence of inflation to levels not seen in 40 years due to a combination of miscalculations in monetary and fiscal policy. The role of Quantitative Easing (QE) – and its future – is discussed in depth. Listen today to gain insights into the economic landscape.

The Case of the Missing Highways

In November 2021, Congress passed and President Joe Biden signed the trillion dollar Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, often referred to as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill (BIF). The bill included funds for:

  • Highways and bridges
  • Buses, subways, and other mass transit systems
  • Amtrak, the federally sponsored corporation that provides most intercity railroad service in the United States, to modernize and expand its service
  • A network of charging stations for electric cars
  • Maintenance and modernization of ports and airports
  • Securing infrastructure against cyberattacks and climate change
  • Increasing access to clean drinking water
  • Expansion of broadband internet, particularly in rural areas
  • Treating soil and groundwater pollution

As with other infrastructure bills, although the federal government provides funding, much of the actual work—and some of the funding—is the responsibility of state and local governments. For instance, nearly all highway construction in the United States is carried out by state highway or transportation departments. These state government agencies design new highways and bridges and contract primarily with private construction firms to do the work.

Because state and local governments carry out most highway and bridge construction, Congress doesn’t always achieve the results they intended when providing the funding.  Bill Dupor, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, has discovered a striking example of this outcome. In 2009, in response to the Great Recession of 2007–2009, Congress passed and President Barack Obama signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA). (We discuss the ARRA in Macroeconomics, Chapter 16, Section 16.5 and Economics, Chapter 26, Section 26.5.) Included in the act was $27.5 billion in new spending on highways. This amount represented a 76 percent increase on previous levels of  federal spending on highways. As Dupor puts it, Congress and the president had “great hopes for the potential of these new grants to create and save construction jobs as well as improve highways.”

Surprisingly, though, Dupor’s analysis of data on the condition of bridges, on miles of highways constructed, and on the number of workers employed in highway construction shows that the billions of dollars Congress directed to infrastructure spending under ARRA had little effect on the nation’s highways and bridges and did not increase employment on highway construction.

What happened to the $27.5 billion Congress had appropriated? Dupor concludes that after receiving the federal funds most state governments:”cut their own contributions to highway capital spending which, in turn, … [freed] up those funds for other uses. Since states were facing budget stress from declining tax revenues resulting from the recession, it stands to reason that states had the incentive to do so.”

He finds that following passage of ARRA many states cut their spending on highway infrastructure while at the same time increasing their spending on other things. For instance, Maryland cut its spending on highways by $73 per person while increasing its spending on education by $129 per person. 

Can we conclude that that Congressional infrastructure spending under ARRA was a failure and the funds were wasted? To answer this question, first keep in mind that when it authorizes an increase in infrastructure spending, Congress often has two goals in mind:

  1. To maintain and expand the country’s infrastructure
  2. To engage in countercyclical fiscal policy

The first goal is obvious but the second can be important as well. Typically, Congress is most likely to authorize a large increase in infrastructure spending during a recession. When the ARRA was passed in the spring of 2009, Congress and President Obama were clear that they hoped that the increased spending authorized in the bill would reduce unemployment from the very high levels at that time.  (Economists and policymakers debated whether additional countercyclical fiscal policy was needed at the time Congress passed the BIF in late 2021. Although the Biden administration argued that the spending was needed to increase employment, some economists argued that the BIF did little to deal with the supply problems then plaguing the economy.)

We discuss in Macroeconomics, Chapter 16, Section 16.2 (Economics, Chapter 26, Section 26.2), how expansionary fiscal policy can increase real GDP and employment during a recession. If Dupor’s analysis is correct, Congress failed to achieve its first goal of improving the country’s infrastructure. But Dupor’s findings that states, in effect, used the federal infrastructure funds for other types of spending, such as on education, means that Congress did meet its second goal. That conclusion holds if in the absence of receiving the $27.5 billion in funds from ARRA, state governments would have had to cut their spending elsewhere, which would have reduced overall government expenditures and reduced aggregate demand. 

As this discussion indicates, the details of how fiscal policy affects the economy can be complex. 

Sources: Gabriel T. Rubin and Eliza Collins, “What’s in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill? From Amtrak to Roads to Water Systems,” wsj.com, November 6, 2021; Bill Dupor, “So Why Didn’t the 2009 Recovery Act Improve the Nation’s Highways and Bridges?” Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis Review, Vol. 99, No. 2, Second Quarter 2017, pp. 169-182; Greg Ip, “President Biden’s Economic Agenda Wasn’t Designed for Shortages and Inflation,” wsj.com, November 10, 2021; and Executive Office of the President, “Updated Fact Sheet: Bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act,” whitehouse.gov, August 2, 2021. 

New 10/17/21 Podcast – Authors Glenn Hubbard & Tony O’Brien discuss economic impact of infrastructure spending & the supply-chain challenges.

Authors Glenn Hubbard and Tony O’Brien discuss the economic impact of the recent infrastructure bill and what role fiscal policy plays in determining shovel-ready projects. Also, they explore the vast impact of the economy-wide supply-chain issues and the challenges companies face. Until the pandemic, we had a very efficient supply chain but now we’re seeing companies employ the “just-in-case” inventory method vs. “just-in-time”!

Some links referenced in the podcast:

Here’s Alan Cole’s blog: https://fullstackeconomics.com/how-i-reluctantly-became-an-inflation-crank/

Neil Irwin wrote a column referencing Cole here:  https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/10/upshot/shadow-inflation-analysis.html

Here’s a Times article on the inefficiency of subway construction in NYC:  https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-construction-costs.html

A recent article on the state of CA’s bullet train:  https://www.kcra.com/article/california-bullet-trains-latest-woe-high-speed/37954851

A WSJ column on goods v. services: https://www.wsj.com/articles/at-times-like-these-inflation-isnt-all-bad-11634290202

Coming Attractions: Hubbard and O’Brien Principles of Economics Updated

It’s customary for textbook authors to note that “much has happened in the economy” since the last edition of their book appeared. To say that much has happened since we prepared our last edition in 2019 would be a major understatement. Never in the lifetimes of today’s students and instructors have events like those of 2020 and 2021 occurred. The U.S. and world economies had experienced nothing like the Covid-19 pandemic since the influenza pandemic of 1918. In the spring of 2020, the U.S. economy suffered an unprecedented decline in the supply of goods and services as a majority of businesses in the country shut down to reduce spread of the virus. Many businesses remained closed or operated at greatly reduced capacity well into 2021. Most schools, including most colleges, switched to remote learning, which disrupted the lives of many students and their parents.

During the worst of the pandemic, total spending in the economy declined as the unemployment rate soared to levels not seen since the Great Depression of the 1930s. Reduced spending and closed businesses resulted in by far the largest decline in total production in such a short period in the history of the U.S. economy. Congress, the Trump and Biden administrations, and the Federal Reserve responded with fiscal and monetary policies that were also unprecedented.

Our updated Eighth Edition covers all of these developments as well as the policy debates they initiated. As with previous editions, we rely on extensive digital resources, including: author-created application videos and audio recordings of the chapter openers and Apply the Concept features; figure animation videos; interactive real-time data graphs animations; and Solved Problem whiteboard videos.

Glenn and Tony discuss the updated edition in this video:

Sample chapters will be available by October 15.

The full Macroeconomics text will available in early to mid December.

The full Microeconomics text will be available in mid to late December.

If you would like to view the sample chapters or are considering adopting the updated Eighth Edition for the spring semester, please contact your local Pearson representative. You can use this LINK to find and contact your representative.

New 09/03/21 Podcast – Authors Glenn Hubbard & Tony O’Brien discuss the recent jobs report, Fed comments, and financial stability!

Authors Glenn Hubbard and Tony O’Brien discuss the recent jobs report falling short of expectations. They also discuss the comments of Fed Chairman Powell’s comments at the Federal Reserve’s recent Jackson Hole conference. They also get to some of the recommendations of a Brookings Task Force, co-chaired by Glenn Hubbard, on ways to address financial stability. Use the links below to see more information about these timely topics:
Powell’s Jackson Hole speech: 

https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/speech/files/powell20210827a.pdf 

The report of Glenn’s task force: 

https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/financial-stability_report.pdf 

The most recent economic forecasts of the FOMC: 

https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/files/fomcprojtabl20210616.pdf

WELCOME BACK! New 08/20/21 Podcast – Authors Glenn Hubbard & Tony O’Brien return to discuss delta variant & inflation!

Join authors Glenn Hubbard and Tony O’Brien as they return for a new academic year! The issues have evolved but the importance of these issues has not waned. We discuss the impact of closures related to the delta variant has on the economy. The discussion extends to the active fiscal and monetary policy that has reintroduced inflation as a topic facing our economy. Many students have little or no experience with inflation so it is a learning opportunity. Check back regularly where Glenn & Tony will continue to wrestle with these important economic concepts and relate them to the classroom!