PrefBlog

The New York Fed has released a Staff Report by Natalia Emanuel and Emma Harrington titled Working Remotely? Selection, Treatment, and the Market for Remote Work:

How does remote work affect productivity and how productive are workers who choose remote jobs? We estimate both effects in a U.S. Fortune 500 firm’s call centers that employed both remote and on-site workers in the same jobs. Prior to COVID-19, remote workers answered 12 percent fewer calls per hour than on-site workers. When the call centers closed due to COVID-19, the productivity of formerly on-site workers declined by 4 percent relative to already-remote workers, indicating that a third of the initial gap was due to a negative treatment effect of remote work. Yet an 8 percent productivity gap persisted, indicating that the majority of the productivity gap was due to negative worker selection into remote work. Difference-in-differences designs also indicate that remote work degraded call quality— particularly for inexperienced workers—and reduced workers’ promotion rates. In a model of the market provision of remote work, we find that firms were in a prisoner’s dilemma: all firms would have gained from offering comparable remote and on-site jobs, but any individual firm was loathe to attract less productive workers.
…
Adverse selection consequently offers an important missing piece to the puzzle of remote work’s rarity prior to Covid-19. Our estimates suggest that adverse selection distorts the decisions of 22 percent of call-center workers who do not choose to be remote because they do not want to pool with less productive types. There is promise that the pandemic could nudge the market into a more efficient equilbrium. Yet distortions will likely persist unless career opportunities can be equalized. Indeed, pre-pandemic remote workers were half as likely to be promoted as on-site workers, consistent with Bloom et al. (2015)’s RCT evidence

John C. Williams, President and Chief Executive Officer of the New York Fed, gave a speech titled This Is the Way:

Nationally, we are also seeing improvements on the supply side of the labor market. As you’ll recall, when businesses reopened after the 2020 pandemic shutdowns, many faced a dire shortage of workers.

Since then, we have seen a rebound in labor force participation, with the 25-to 54-year-old age group slightly above pre-pandemic levels. Although overall participation is below where it was before Covid, economists at the New York Fed have found that this shortfall is more than fully accounted for by the aging—or what I prefer to call “maturing”—of the workforce.2

This increase in labor force participation has helped alleviate some of the imbalance in the labor market. But with baby boomers increasingly reaching retirement age, population aging will continue to put downward pressure on participation in the medium term. Increases in the labor force from immigration, which has picked up from its pandemic lows, can partially offset this, but it is unlikely to fully undo the impact.
…
At the same time, the March price data indicate some moderation in overall rent inflation. And rents for new leases have been showing slower rates of increases, which should bring down shelter inflation in coming months. This is important because shelter inflation had been a significant driver of higher inflation over the past year.

But the most persistent area of inflation is in core services excluding housing, which has been running around 4-1/2 percent since last August . This is driven by a continued imbalance in overall supply and demand, and it will take the longest to bring down.
…
Because of the lag between policy actions and their effects, it will take time for the FOMC’s actions to restore balance to the economy and return inflation to our 2 percent target. I expect inflation to decline to around 3-1/4 percent this year, before returning to our longer-run goal of 2 percent over the next two years.

As tighter monetary policy continues to take effect, I expect real GDP to grow modestly this year, with growth then picking up somewhat next year.

And I anticipate slow growth will continue to cool the labor market, with unemployment gradually rising to about 4 to 4-1/2 percent over the next year.

François Villeroy de Galhau, Governor of the Bank of France, gave a speech titled Monetary policy transmission:

Overall, evidence shows a quick and smooth pass-through of ECB decisions to broad financing conditions, which is the first step of monetary policy transmission. The growth rate of bank loans to households and firms has slowed due to a combination of higher borrowing rates, lower demand, and – for firms – tighter credit standards. Volumes of loans are decelerating, even though growth in outstanding amounts remains positive [+3.3% in the euro area for mortgages to households and +5.2% for loans to businesses]. By the way, the growth of loans in France remains significantly higher than in the euro area average.

The second step of monetary policy transmission goes from the overall financing conditions to the economy and to inflation. In the textbook theory, tighter financial conditions moderate aggregate demand, and then decrease inflation with some lags. The estimated transmission lags of monetary policy in the literature vary from one year1 to more than two years2. At the current juncture several factors may bring us closer to the upper range:

The current tightening cycle started from exceptionally low levels of real interest rates. It is only from the end of 2022 that we achieved positive real rates at all maturities – but we are now clearly in restrictive territory.
the proportion of fixed-rate long-term loans is particularly high by historical standards. This is welcome for financial stability, especially for mortgages. But as a result, the pass-through of higher policy rates is more gradual.
The origin and sectorial composition of inflation matters. The current surge in inflation does not primarily originate in overheated demand but in supply shocks. This has implication for the transmission lags.
(i) The rise in the price of commodities and input costs was at the root of inflation. Their pass-through to producer prices and subsequently to CPI inflation might be asymmetric, faster and more complete on the way up than on the way down. It implies that the current decline in energy and input costs may not fully translate yet into lower inflation.

(ii) Services inflation, in part fuelled by wage developments, has gradually but steadily surged over recent quarters, and is likely to become the dominant source of inflation in the euro area. Historically, services are the most persistent and important component of both headline and core inflation, and their share in consumption increased significantly in the last decades. They are less directly sensitive to interest rates; the dampening effect of monetary policy on aggregate demand will be felt, but it will take more time.
…
Monetary policy is at work and rest assured, we’ll do the job: we’ll bring inflation back towards 2%. We’ll do it with the necessary patience – looking at the 2025 horizon for full transmission, with persistence – maintaining restrictive interest rates for long enough, and pragmatism – monitoring actual economic data. But once more, monetary policy cannot be the only game in town. Fiscal policies should adjust and consolidate, first and foremost scrapping energy subsidies as the European Commission rightly advocated yesterday ; wage negotiations and mark-up decisions by firms should incorporate the expected decrease in inflation; and still more, structural reforms are needed more than ever to increase the supply-side capacity and flexibility in Europe and in France.3 And this is where Capital Markets Union would greatly help to finance investment and innovation, and hence reduce inflation. Let us acknowledge it: if we are lagging behind today in Europe, it’s in this domain of supply transformations, and not in monetary policy.

And Christopher J Waller, Member of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, gave a speech titled Hike, skip, or pause?:

Let me turn to the implications for monetary policy. There is a lot of discussion about the next step for policy. There are three options: hike, skip, or pause. Let me outline reasons why each of these options may be appropriate.

One might lean toward hiking by focusing on the economic data and interpreting it to suggest that inflation and economic activity are not consistent with significant and ongoing progress toward the FOMC’s 2 percent inflation goal. Based solely on the data we have in hand as of today, we are not making much progress on inflation. If one doesn’t believe the incoming data will be much better, one could advocate for another 25-basis-point hike as the appropriate action in June.

Alternatively, one might view the current and incoming data as supporting a hike in June but believe that caution is warranted because there is a high level of uncertainty about how credit conditions are evolving. Another hike combined with an abrupt and unexpected tightening of credit conditions may push the economy down in a rapid and undesirable manner. This possibility is the downside risk of an additional rate hike in the current environment. If one is sufficiently worried about this downside risk, then prudent risk management would suggest skipping a hike at the June meeting but leaning toward hiking in July based on the incoming inflation data. There is a little over a month between the June and July FOMC meetings, and during that time we will learn more about how credit conditions are evolving. Over four months will have passed between the Silicon Valley Bank failure and the July meeting. By then we will have a much clearer idea about credit conditions. If banking conditions do not appear to have tightened excessively, then hiking in July could well be the appropriate policy.

Lastly, one might want to pause hikes at the June meeting, meaning that the target range is at its terminal rate, if the current stance of policy is thought to be enough to bring inflation down over time. Between policy lags and possible tightening credit conditions, the current stance of monetary policy may be seen, at that point, as sufficiently restrictive to move us toward the dual mandate. From this viewpoint, the policy rate is high enough and we simply need to hold it there to bring inflation down toward our 2 percent target.

I do not expect the data coming in over the next couple of months will make it clear that we have reached the terminal rate. And I do not support stopping rate hikes unless we get clear evidence that inflation is moving down towards our 2 percent objective. But whether we should hike or skip at the June meeting will depend on how the data come in over the next three weeks. We will get additional labor market data, with some information about wages, and additional inflation numbers in the next few weeks that will continue to shape my view on where we stand relative to the FOMC’s dual mandate. During this time, I’ll also be reviewing data on credit conditions to evaluate how much potential tightening is coming from the banking sector.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 30th, 2023 at 8:19 pm and is filed under Market Action. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.