Uneasy Money

Last week Roger Farmer wrote a post elaborating on a comment that he had left to my post on Price Stickiness and Macroeconomics. Roger’s comment is aimed at this passage from my post:

[A]lthough price stickiness is a sufficient condition for inefficient macroeconomic fluctuations, it is not a necessary condition. It is entirely possible that even with highly flexible prices, there would still be inefficient macroeconomic fluctuations. And the reason why price flexibility, by itself, is no guarantee against macroeconomic contractions is that macroeconomic contractions are caused by disequilibrium prices, and disequilibrium prices can prevail regardless of how flexible prices are.

Here’s Roger’s comment:

I have a somewhat different take. I like Lucas’ insistence on equilibrium at every point in time as long as we recognize two facts. 1. There is a continuum of equilibria, both dynamic and steady state and 2. Almost all of them are Pareto suboptimal.

I made the following reply to Roger’s comment:

Roger, I think equilibrium at every point in time is ok if we distinguish between temporary and full equilibrium, but I don’t see how there can be a continuum of full equilibria when agents are making all kinds of long-term commitments by investing in specific capital. Having said that, I certainly agree with you that expectational shifts are very important in determining which equilibrium the economy winds up at.

To which Roger responded:

I am comfortable with temporary equilibrium as the guiding principle, as long as the equilibrium in each period is well defined. By that, I mean that, taking expectations as given in each period, each market clears according to some well defined principle. In classical models, that principle is the equality of demand and supply in a Walrasian auction. I do not think that is the right equilibrium concept.

Roger didn’t explain – at least not here, he probably has elsewhere — exactly why he doesn’t think equality of demand and supply in a Walrasian auction is not the right equilibrium concept. But I would be interested in hearing from him why he thinks equality of supply and demand is not the right equilibrium concept. Perhaps he will clarify his thinking for me.

Hicks wanted to separate ‘fix price markets’ from ‘flex price markets’. I don’t think that is the right equilibrium concept either. I prefer to use competitive search equilibrium for the labor market. Search equilibrium leads to indeterminacy because there are not enough prices for the inputs to the search process. Classical search theory closes that gap with an arbitrary Nash bargaining weight. I prefer to close it by making expectations fundamental [a proposition I have advanced on this blog].

I agree that the Hicksian distinction between fix-price markets and flex-price markets doesn’t cut it. Nevertheless, it’s not clear to me that a Thompsonian temporary-equilibrium model in which expectations determine the reservation wage at which workers will accept employment (i.e, the labor-supply curve conditional on the expected wage) doesn’t work as well as a competitive search equilibrium in this context.

Once one treats expectations as fundamental, there is no longer a multiplicity of equilibria. People act in a well defined way and prices clear markets. Of course ‘market clearing’ in a search market may involve unemployment that is considerably higher than the unemployment rate that would be chosen by a social planner. And when there is steady state indeterminacy, as there is in my work, shocks to beliefs may lead the economy to one of a continuum of steady state equilibria.

There is an equilibrium for each set of expectations (with the understanding, I presume, that expectations are always uniform across agents). The problem that I see with this is that there doesn’t seem to be any interaction between outcomes and expectations. Expectations are always self-fulfilling, and changes in expectations are purely exogenous. But in a classic downturn, the process seems to be cumulative, the contraction seemingly feeding on itself, causing a spiral of falling prices, declining output, rising unemployment, and increasing pessimism.

That brings me to the second part of an equilibrium concept. Are expectations rational in the sense that subjective probability measures over future outcomes coincide with realized probability measures? That is not a property of the real world. It is a consistency property for a model.

Yes; I agree totally. Rational expectations is best understood as a property of a model, the property being that if agents expect an equilibrium price vector the solution of the model is the same equilibrium price vector. It is not a substantive theory of expectation formation, the model doesn’t posit that agents correctly foresee the equilibrium price vector, that’s an extreme and unrealistic assumption about how the world actually works, IMHO. The distinction is crucial, but it seems to me that it is largely ignored in practice.

And yes: if we plop our agents down into a stationary environment, their beliefs should eventually coincide with reality.

This seems to me a plausible-sounding assumption for which there is no theoretical proof, and in view of Roger’s recent discussion of unit roots, dubious empirical support.

If the environment changes in an unpredictable way, it is the belief function, a primitive of the model, that guides the economy to a new steady state. And I can envision models where expectations on the transition path are systematically wrong.

I need to read Roger’s papers about this, but I am left wondering by what mechanism the belief function guides the economy to a steady state? It seems to me that the result requires some pretty strong assumptions.

The recent ‘nonlinearity debate’ on the blogs confuses the existence of multiple steady states in a dynamic model with the existence of multiple rational expectations equilibria. Nonlinearity is neither necessary nor sufficient for the existence of multiplicity. A linear model can have a unique indeterminate steady state associated with an infinite dimensional continuum of locally stable rational expectations equilibria. A linear model can also have a continuum of attracting points, each of which is an equilibrium. These are not just curiosities. Both of these properties characterize modern dynamic equilibrium models of the real economy.

I’m afraid that I don’t quite get the distinction that is being made here. Does “multiple steady states in a dynamic model” mean multiple equilibria of the full Arrow-Debreu general equilibrium model? And does “multiple rational-expectations equilibria” mean multiple equilibria conditional on the expectations of the agents? And I also am not sure what the import of this distinction is supposed to be.

My further question is, how does all of this relate to Leijonhfuvud’s idea of the corridor, which Roger has endorsed? My own understanding of what Axel means by the corridor is that the corridor has certain stability properties that keep the economy from careening out of control, i.e. becoming subject to a cumulative dynamic process that does not lead the economy back to the neighborhood of a stable equilibrium. But if there is a continuum of attracting points, each of which is an equilibrium, how could any of those points be understood to be outside the corridor?

Anyway, those are my questions. I am hoping that Roger can enlighten me.