Competition Policy - Core Economics

Living/minimum wage: what we know

Version 1.0 (April 24, 2019)

A couple of weeks ago, I got ensnarled in one of these debates on Facebook that do not go anywhere; it was triggered by the Australian Labor Party’s recent Living Wage policy proposal and the related discussion about the merits of minimum wages, and there specifically whether increases in minimum wages have negative employment effects and even more specifically whether such detrimental employment effects hit those at the low end of the wage distribution. These debates tie into other current debates like the one about lacking wages growth about which even the RBA is now concerned; see also Fig 17.17 here, or the one about wage theft which even the current government — not known for its charitable inclinations — says it wants to address, or the one about growing inequality which, as it affects aggregate demand, has to be a growing concern for any economist worth her or his money.

The debate on Facebook I referred to at the outset did not go anywhere because it turned out that the conceptual and empirical issues of the effects of minimum wages on employment are quite different from what most people have learned in basic Econ 101. And, unfortunately, about 99 percent of those currently engaging in the debate about the effects of minimum wages have not gone beyond that level of understanding, even if they claim economics expertise. So, I bowed out of that debate at some point and read up on it. Here is what I understand the current state of the science to be. I am open to suggestions on where I might get it wrong. Feel free to comment away.

The traditional understanding results from what is (still) being taught in most principles courses: that the demand curve for any good, or factor of production, is downward sloping, i.e.. the higher the price (e.g., of labor) the less of it will be demanded. That given, a simple graph establishes that equilibrium price and quantity are determined by the interaction of demand and supply. If a binding floor is established (i.e., if a price is set by some law or ordinance above the equilibrium price), quantity demanded will be constrained and less of it will be employed. Ignoring for now the important question whether labour should be considered just another factor of production or whether there is more to it – a point for another overdue debate -, the fact that less labor might be employed is not necessarily a bad thing, a point that many people do not seem to grasp. It all depends on the “elasticity of demand” which is a measure that relates the responsiveness of the quantity demanded to price changes. If the price increases (brought about by a law or ordinance that sets a price above the equilibrium price) are large but negative employment effects not quite as much, a case can possibly be made for some such law or ordinance.

So far so good and probably uncontroversial even among most economists and journalists who write on economic issues. It is also fairly uncontroversial that long-run measures of responsiveness of employment to price changes (“elasticities”) tend to be larger than short-term measures and that these elasticities might be different for different locations on the demand curve and for that matter different demand curves. What exactly the appropriate elasticity estimate is for various contexts is arguably more controversial. On balance, economists are sceptical about market interventions of this kind, and often for good reasons (e.g., the well documented consequences of rent-controls although even here a more critical attitude is emerging).

In come Card & Krueger (1994) with a study published in one of the top journals of economics, and a provocatively titled book a year later with one of the top presses, in which they seem to be able to show, relying on an intriguing natural experiment that inspired hundreds of studies and contributed to the credibility revolution in economics, that raising the minimum wage has no adverse effect on employment. Wow.

Not surprisingly, this study was heavily contested.

The debate continues to the day and I will below discuss some key contributions to the debate and also some of the kerfuffle surrounding the recent Seattle minimum wage experiment which is ongoing.

As you will see there are many moving parts, conceptually and empirically, confounding these debates. My list of things to keep in mind follows; below I will refer to them as “caveats”.

Caveat 1: The simple Econ 101 model of the effects of a minimum wage (or price floor) is flawed because it does not take into account dynamic effects. For example, in a growing economy (such as the Seattle market has been for a while), it is important to study a minimum wage effect against the counterfactual which is not easy to establish. Among the ways labor market researchers have approached the topic is the “synthetic approach” of identifying districts outside of an urban center that are, however, in their sum well matched in observable characteristics. Another strategy has been natural experiments across state borders when one state changed the minimum wage and the other did not.

Caveat 2: Any minimum wage increase (especially when drastic) will not only have, possibly, employment effects for those whose wages go up but for those that have wages above the price floor. It is unclear conceptually how some such “ripple effect” could pan out: Will those workers that earn more (as apparently a considerable number of workers in the restaurant industry do), suddenly put in less effort, and/or will those that have their wages increased provide more? What are the results of the long-term adjustments processes of what is the relative efficiency wage between those with lesser skills and those with more?

Caveat 3: An important issue is temporary job-seekers (e.g., students on their holidays or teenage workers to earn some change, or other part-time workers, etc.) and to what extent adverse employment efects will disproportionately fall on them. In his simulation exercise, MaCurdy makes the important point that, even if one accepts that there are no adverse employment effects, those benefitting from an increase in minimum wages are not necessarily low-income families. In fact according to his data “low-wage families are typically not low-income families.” (p. 534) And, “The increased earnings received by the poorest families are only marginally higher than those of the wealthiest. One in four families in the top fifth of the income distribution has low-wage worker which is the same share as in the bottom fifth.” (pp. 534-5) The problem is that while “fewer than one in four low-income families benefit from a minimum wage increase of the sort adopted in 1996, all low-income families pay for this increase through higher prices, rendering three in four low-income families as net losers.” (p. 535) Clearly the incidence of price increases is an important consideration, and needs to be controlled for.

Caveat 4: Relatedly, there is the issue of the gig-economy which tends to put pressure on wages in the low-skill sector and allows price floors for labor to be circumvented by making participants into “entrepreneurs” of sorts. This seems currently a completely understudied area.

Caveat 5: Another important issue is whether wage increases are implemented locally, regionally, or on the national level. Minimum wages on the national and even the regional level are presumably less easily circumvented than those on the local level, although it is probably a mistake to underestimate the attractiveness of big urban centers.

Caveat 6: An important issue is anticipation effects which can pollute supposed quasi RCTs. This explicitly motivated the study by Bell & Machin (2018).

Caveat 7: If the simple Econ 101 model of the effects of a minimum wage (or price floor) is flawed because it does not take into account dynamic effects, then the question has to be asked which alternative model could explain the results. Prominent competing labour market theories are those of monopsonistic, or oligopolistic, competition with search costs, or efficiency wages. Belman & Wolfson (2014) have a useful discussion of such models in graphical form. See also this or this.

Caveat 8: As for the abatement of carbon emissions there are typical several other policy options and therefore it is important to keep in mind that there may be other policy tools such as earned income tax credits that would address the policy goal of a minimum, or living, wage more effective- and efficiently. In this context the important question arises who ultimately pays for minimum wages. Assuming no adverse employment effects, the question is whether employers manage to push increased labor costs through to consumers, or whether they have to take some hit to their profits. This seems to be another poorly understudied area. The available evidence (see MaCurdy 2015 and Draca et al. 2011), Bell & Machin 2018, and this very interesting paper by Harasztosi & Lindner 2017) is inconclusive. More about these papers below.

Caveat 9: Debates about minimum or living wages should not be backward looking. They ought to happen in the context of an ever increasing automatization and inequality (in Australia surely in terms of wealth and quite possibly also in terms of income).

Caveat 10: Many of the empirical findings that we have are from The United States. Naturally, we should not take for granted that the findings (to the extent that we might agree on them) translate to the Australian context. There is, fortunately, an interesting literature documenting the effects of the (1999) introduction of minimum wages in England (including at least one meta-study), and an emerging literature documenting the effects of the (2015) introduction of a living wage in England (Bell & Machin (2018). There will soon be yet another emerging literature that draws on the minimum wage experiment that Germany launched in 2015. And importantly, there is the very interesting paper by Harasztosi & Lindner (2017) on the Hungarian experience with a dramatic increase of 60 percent in the minimum wage in 2001.

Back now to the debate and some key contributions and also some of the recent kerfuffle about the Seattle experiment which are ongoing.

Card & Krueger (1994, 1995a, 1995b, 2000, 2016, chapter 1, 2017) studied the fast-food industry in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. The former increased the minimum wage in April 1992. The original Card & Krueger 1994 findings suggested – to many economists’ surprise — that there was no employment effect of that increase in the minimum wage. This finding was contested by Neumark & Wascher (2000) who argued that the Card & Krueger data – because they were collected through telephone surveys – were unreliable. Drawing on payroll administrative data, they argued furthermore that the New Jersey minimum-wage increase led to a decline in fast-food employment. Neumark has emerged as arguably the most influential critic of Card & Krueger and maintains, for example in this recent IZA primer, that ”A great deal of evidence indicates that the wage gains from minimum wage increases are offset, for some workers, by fewer jobs. Furthermore the evidence on distributional effects, though limited, does not point to favourable outcomes from minimum wage hikes, although some groups may benefit.” In their response to Neumark & Wascher, Card & Krueger questioned the representativeness of the Neumark & Wascher data and instead used two different kinds of longitudinal and repeated cross-sectional administrative data reported to the BLS. They conclude that “the increase in the New Jersey minimum wage in April 1992 had little or no systematic effect on total fast-food employment in the state, although there may have been individual restaurants where employment rose or fell in response to the higher minimum wage.” (p. 1398) In chapter 1 of the 2016 version of their book Card & Krueger re-iterate this finding and argue “This book presents a new body of evidence showing that recent minimum-wage increases have not had the negative employment effects predicted by the textbook model. Some of the new evidence points toward a positive effect of the minimum wage on employment; most shows no effect at all. Moreover, a reanalysis of previous minimum wage studies finds little support for the prediction that minimum wages reduce employment.” (Chapter 1, page 1)

Building on a meta-analysis that Card & Krueger did in the same year they published their book, Doucouliagos & Stanley (2009) provided a meta-regression analysis of minimum wage research drawing on 64 (!) minimum wage studies. Importantly, they controlled for publication selection bias and they find that, when selection effects are filtered out, “no evidence of a meaningful adverse selection effect” (p. 422) (thus confirming the earlier results of Card & Krueger). Specifically, “In the minimum-wage literature, the magnitude of the publication selection is large or larger, on average, then the underlying reported estimate. … Even under generous assumptions about what might constitute ‘best practice’ in this area of research, little or no evidence of an adverse effect remains in the empirical research record, one the effects of publication selection are removed.” (p. 423) In passing, Doucouliagos & Stanley, who have no recognizable dog in this fight (as much of their work involves meta-analyses of various areas), suggest that the “subjective narrative review” provided by Neumark & Wascher (2007) that covers the same literature (but comes to a very different conclusion) is wanting because it does not control for publication bias. A more recent meta-analysis by Belman & Wolfson (2014) of minimum wage studies published between 2000 and 2013 also confirms the Card & Krueger results, finding a median elasticity of employment or hours with respect to the minimum wage of between -0.05 and -0.03, not controlling, however, for publication bias.

Dube and his colleagues (including Michael Reich, one of the protagonists of the Seattle minimum wage study controversy) provided yet more evidence in support of the results claimed by Card & Krueger. Inspired by their identification strategy, they compare restaurant and retail employment in contiguous countries across state borders, and there in particular segments with minimum wage differences over a 17-year period. The border discontinuity design has attractive features spelled out in Dube (2017) where one can also find a succinct summary of his later work, a good discussion of related work, and of alternative approaches. Acknowledging that “the topic of employment effect of minimum wages remains controversial, with sometimes conflicting evidence” (p. 820), in his own work he finds employment elasticity close to zero (also for teens), and “even when we considered the longer-terms effects (e.g., four or five years out), we found employment estimates to be fairly small.” (p. 820) Reflecting on his recent work with Lester and Reich (2016), he notes “We found a striking pattern … This trifecta of results – strong positive wage effect, small employment effect, and strong negative turnover effect – is a signature of a model with search frictions … “ (p. 821) None of these papers, however, controls for the effects of minimum wages on prices (recall MaCurdy’s results) and/or profits, something which seems necessary if one wants to understand the net effect of a minimum wage increase.

Additional empirical evidence in favour from the UK, where a national minimum wage was introduced in 1999, and a national “living wage” in 2015 (by a conservative government, no less), is reviewed in Lemieux (2017) and Card & Krueger (2017); summarizes Lemieux, “By moving from a situation of no minimum wage to one with a large and differentiated (by age) minimum wage, the United Kingdom was an ideal laboratory … . A clear consensus in the British literature supports that the new minimum wage had, and continues to have, no effects on employment. … On balance, it appears that the evidence accumulated since 1995 has, if anything, reinforced Card and Krieger’s conclusion of no (or modest) employment effects of the minimum wage.” (p. 824) While Lemieux mentions the results by Machin, Manning, & Rahman (2003) … he does not mention Leonard, Doucouliagis, & Stanley (2013) which is puzzling.

Card & Krueger point out that these new data allow also inferences about how the wage distribution is affected. “Relative to the literature on the employment effects of minimum wages, there are fewer recent studies of the distributional impacts. …Exploiting the remarkable history of minimum wage legislation in the United Kingdom, Dickens et al. (2012) concluded that the introduction of the national minimum wage had a strong effect on the lower tail of British wages, pushing up the wages of workers as high as the 35^th percentile in the overall wage distribution.” (p. 829) That is a remarkable result that, if true, speaks to Caveat 2 that I formulated above and it suggests that restricting attention to those directly affected by wage increases is a problematic strategy.

As stated by Dube, “the topic of employment effect of minimum wages remains controversial, with sometimes conflicting evidence”. (p. 820) Another prominent contrarian, apart from Neumark, is Jonathan Meer. Meer & West (2016), who estimate a large negative effect of minimum wages on aggregate employment, is discussed in Dube (2017) who suggests – based on his empirical work – that these putative job losses happen higher in the wage distribution, “raising questions about the causal import of their estimates”. (p. 820) Meer (2018) summarizes his take on the literature, including his own work and that of the Jardim et al. (2017) study of the Seattle minimum wage experiment. Says he, riffing on an even more partisan earlier assessment of the literature (Meer 2017): “Following the minimum wage increase [to $13 per hour in 2016 [January] from $11 in 2015 [April] and $9.32 in 2014], total payroll for low-wage workers actually fell by an average of $125 per month: those workers for whom the increase was supposed to help were actually receiving fewer dollars on average after the minimum wage increase than before. Unsurprisingly, the study came in for immediate criticism from minimum wage advocates, but its methodological approach is sound and most of the critiques are groundless.” (p. 6) These are strong claims and they would be more credible if his literature review would be less partisan (e.g., no word about the meta-studies by Doucouliagos & Stanley 2009 and Belman & Wolfson 2014, also no word really about the English experiment which is of interest for the simple reason that minimum wage is differentiated by age, thus having the potential to address one of Meer’s concerns).

The Seattle experiment, and some of the ugly politics around it (also academically) has been widely reported on (here and here and here and here and here and here).

Since the Jardim et al. (2017) paper, the same group of researchers has published a follow-up study (Jardim et al. [October] 2018) that assesses the impact of the first and second min wage increases in 2015 and 2016, using again longitudinal workforce data (“employment trajectories of thousands of individual employees engaged in low-wage work immediately before each increase”, p. 4) collected by the state of Washington’s Employment Security Department. The new analysis follows the same identification strategy as the earlier study (of trying to compare Seattle low-wage workers with matched controls from outlying Washington State) but comes to a different conclusion: “While these workers experienced a modest reduction in hours worked, on net their pretax earnings increased an average of around $10 a week” (p. 4, see also p. 25) However, the bulk of these gains went to more experienced workers, with less experienced workers being about as well of as before. As Jardim et al. (2018) admit, “The findings contrast with our earlier work, which showed that the total amount paid to workers in low-wage jobs in Seattle declined after the second minimum wage increase in 2016.” (p. 25) I am tempted at this point to paraphrase Meer (2017), If your immediate reaction to this study is to dismiss it, “it is time to admit your views cannot be swayed by science. They might as well be religion.” (p.7) Say it as it is, Jonathan.

But, seriously, it is important to understand that any one single case (study) is only so telling and often a work in progress. The case of Seattle is so unique (see also this excellent recent story about Amazon) that the caveat in Jardim et al. (2018) not to generalize this finding to state and federal policy changes seems warranted.

Looking at all the evidence that is currently out there (and that I paraded above), I conclude that the balance of the evidence seems to provide considerable support in favour of policy recommendations that contradict the standard Econ 101 narrative, even if we accept that labor should be considered just any old factor of production.

Local circumstances have, of course, to be part of any attempt to implement minimum wages and/or living wages. It is also worthwhile remembering Alan Krueger’s admonition from 2015 that “$15 an hour is beyond international experience, and could well be counterproductive. Although some high-wage cities and states could probably absorb a $15-an-hour minimum wage with little or no job loss, it is far from clear that the same could be said for every state, city and town in the United States.” (Krueger 2015) Krueger, however, issued that caveat before the results in Harasztosi & Lindner (2017) started to circulate which are remarkable indeed. These authors analyse a very large (~60% in real terms) minimum wage increase in Hungary in 2001. Among the remarkable results are that this very large increase displaced four years out only 1 out of 10 minimum wage workers while those that held on to their job experienced a 50% wage increase. Importantly, while firms predictably responded to the increase by trying to substitute away from labor to capital, they showed that “around 80% of the wage increase paid by consumers of goods produced by minimum wage workers and only 20% was paid by firm owners.” (abstract) Not surprisingly, there is considerable heterogeneity to be found in firms’ ability to pass through the increased minimum wage. Interestingly the result that forced increases in labor cost can be for the most part pushed through to consumers contradicts the results reported for the English minimum and living wages experiences. Draca et al (2011 ), based on the 1999 minimum wage increases, find that they find their way directly into profit reductions. Bell & Machin (2018 ), based on the 2015 minimum wage increase, find that it finds its way directly into lower firm value, a story consistent with Draca et al.’s but not with MaCurdy or the story Harasztosi & Lindner (2017) tell. Hmmmh.

The implications of the currently available evidence for Australia are worth thinking through carefully. Taking into account purchasing power parity which probably means that a wage of around 15 Aussie dollars seems a safe proposition in particular if age – adjusted following the English model. Importantly, there may be better policy interventions out there such as earned income credit and other active labor market programs. Card et al. (2018) have recently reviewed the available options.

It seems very desirable to think through these issues in non-partisan matter (i.e., have what we know assessed through forms of adversarial collaborations by knowledgeable people representing key stakeholders in the debate) and with a longer-term perspective that takes into account the nature of work in the future. Not being a labor market researcher, one of the frustrations I experienced when reading up on this literature is the often very partisan assessment of the findings out there. For example, if you are an opponent of minimum wages and selectively point at evidence to support your stand, you lose credibility right away when not mentioning the meta-studies out there that do exist (and that so far support the Card & Krueger findings).

I appreciate, without implicating, Stepan Jurajda’s and Jonathan Meer’s pointers towards relevant literature and Stepan’s and my colleague Gigi Foster’s feedback on an earlier draft. Needless to say, they are not to blame for errors in fact or opinion.

Consider following me on Twitter at @aortmannphd

Comments on the Interim Report of the Royal Commission into Misconduct in the Banking, Superannuation, and Financial Services Industry

October 26, 2018

The following remarks are informed by discussions during a by-invitation-only roundtable on October 19 that was organized by the UNSW Business School research networks on Cyber Security and Data Governance and Behavioural Insights for Business and Policy. It was attended by a judicious mix of 14 legal academics and (behavioural, experimental, and financial) economists as well as representatives of behavioural insights units from government and firms in the banking industry. The roundtable took part under the Chatham House Rule and was meant to facilitate an open discourse about the issues identified in the Royal Commission’s Interim Report, especially its chapter 10 and therein pages 327 – 342 and pages 345 – 7, as well as other chapters (namely 1, 8 and 9).
While my comments draw on those discussions, the following comments reflect my opinion only. Importantly, my opinion below does not necessarily reflect my employer’s view.
Kudos first to Commissioner Hayne and the senior counsels assisting (namely Rowena Orr and Michael Hodge) for a job well-done in uncovering plenty of misconduct when, in the run-up, representatives of the government du jour repeatedly argued, and strenuously so, that there was nothing to see here, that the call for a Royal Commission (RC) was a populist whinge, and that an RC would endanger economic growth by undermining trust in the banks, superannuation providers, and the financial services industry more generally. It seems obvious now that these claims were made despite better knowledge. It seems important to recall this fact, as the implementation of effective solutions – even if evidence-based – is likely to encounter considerable opposition and attempts to water them down. Strategic dishonesty is a thing and it is at the heart of the problems so competently ferreted out by the RC.
Kudos also to ASIC – much maligned these days – since it clearly has provided a considerable portion of the relevant systematic evidence under not always favourable conditions (e.g., the substantial reduction in its resources announced in the 2014 budget; the fact that some of these resources were restored in 2016 cannot distract from the fact that any such disruption is counterproductive).
For an economist who knows the empirical (including the experimental) evidence on the effects of market power, incentives (especially those in social dilemma situations), and on human actors’ frequent failure to be ethical (honest) and in violations of existing norms of conduct, there is nothing surprising in the Interim Report. Likewise, the failure of the regulators to interfere effectively was hardly surprising, although the discussion of effective remedies among economists is likely to be more robust than on the other topics.

5.1. We know for example that market power begets socially suboptimal outcomes (e.g., Huck et al. JEBO 2004, or any textbook on Industrial Organization worth its cost).

5.2. We know, for example, that incentives, especially when in conflict with organizational or societal welfare, lead to undesirable outcomes (e.g., the huge literature on trust games reviewed in Ortmann et al. EE 2000, or more systematically in Johnson & Mislin JoEP 2011)

5.3. We know, for example, that, even for low stakes, there is a considerable amount of people that will always be unethical, with many more people being easily tempted by dishonest behaviour as the stakes increase (e.g., Rosenbaum et al. JoEP 2014; Abeler et al. JPublE 2014; Kajackaite & Gneezy GEB 2017; Capraro JDM 2018; Heck et al. JDM; Abeler et al. ECMTA forthcoming). People’s susceptibility to norm violations has been documented since Adam Smith wrote his The Theory of Moral Sentiments. For more recent evidence, see some of the evidence from psychology and related behavioural sciences in Gentilin (2016; for a critique of that evidence see Ortmann CE 2016 and references therein).

5.4. The question of effective remedies is a more complicated one. It touches on numerous mechanism design issues, although even there one can tap into a considerable empirical (and experimental) literature that addresses questions such as the relative efficacy of self-regulation (possibly under the threat of government intervention; see Van Koten & Ortmann 2017), certification, and other institutions such as independent standards boards that administer ethical culture surveys and whiste-blower protection, and provide pools of principal integrity officers, as suggested in Dennis Gentilin’s submission. More on these issues below under 7.

That breaches were so many and so widespread will, especially in light of the significantly larger stakes at stake, not surprise any economist who knows the literature on the negative effects of market power, poorly designed and calibrated incentives, and many human actors’ tendency to be economical with the truth, and in violation of norms (especially if the chance that they are found out is minimal – see Dana et al. ET 2007)). Pages 268 – 270 of the Interim Report get it exactly right: “There being little threat of failure of the enterprise, and there being little competitive pressure, pursuit of profit has trumped consideration of how the profit is made. The banks have gone to the edge of what is permitted, and too often beyond that limit, … because they can; and because they profit from the misconduct that is described in this report.” (p. 269)

7. So what needs to be done to prevent the conduct from happening again?

7.1. It seems obvious that extant law be applied to lay charges for unconscionable acts such as charging customers fees for advice they did not receive. (While it is laudable that ASIC has secured hundreds of millions in refunds for affected customers, it has come through enforceable undertakings which let the perpetrators of criminal actions off the hook.) Other potentially criminal offences have been committed and they should be pursued under current law wherever possible. Unfortunately, the current state of affairs has considerable reputational spill-over effects and contributes to the wide-spread decline of trust in key institutions.

7.2. It seems clear that the light-touch approach of ASIC, and APRA, has not served the community well although it is hard to tell from the outside whether tough cops – such as Allan Fels and Graeme Samuel – alone can do the trick (Irvine SMH September 22, 2018).

7.3. It also seems abundantly clear that Commissioner Hayne’s assessment of the sorry state of internal compliance assessment and reporting within CBA and NAB (and possibly other banks) justifies immediate action (p. 10 of Interim Report).

7.4. I do agree with Fels that structural separation of banks from their financial advisory arms is the way to go (Irvine SMH September 22, 2018). The same applies in my view for superannuation providers. The conflicts of interest are just too obvious to ignore and some proposed remedies (such as disclosure of conflicts of interests) seem to have counterproductive effects (e.g., Taguchi & Kamijo 2018, for a recent review of the literature).

7.5. Relatedly, the whole commission business has to be reconsidered. See also the relevant discussion on the broken model of broker remuneration in the Productivity Commission’s June 29 report on Competition in the Australian Financial System (pp. 21- 23) Financial advisors are effectively glorified salespeople and incentivizing them through commissions is a recipe for disaster under the best of circumstances.

7.6. Relatedly, the variable-remuneration provisions for accountable persons according to BEAR have to be rethought. I endorse fully Recommendation One and Two in Dennis Gentilin’s submission on the RC’s Interim Report.

7.7. I also endorse fully Recommendations Four through Eight of Dennis Gentilin’s submission on the RC’s Interim Report and the rationale they are based on. What exactly the relation of an Independent Standards Board would be to Treasury, APRA, ASIC, and possibly ACCC, is as worthy of a good discussion as is a discussion of appointment procedures to that Board. See also the discussion of “a competition champion” in the Productivity Commission’s June 29 report on Competition in the Australian Financial System (pp. 15 – 19). Preferably the appointment of the Chair of some such Board would be consensus-driven and not partisan. (The sorry partisan transition from the first to the second ACNC Commissioner is not a recommended template.) I believe that Mr. Gentilin’s Recommendation Six – to have the proposed Independent Standards Board oversee the recruitment and appointment of Principal Integrity Officers to designated ADIs — is a brilliant one that will be key in guaranteeing the independence of Principal Integrity Officers. With Mr. Gentilin (specifically Recommendation Eight and its rationale), I believe that the establishment of a Whistleblowing Protection Authority is an indispensable and complementary step if indeed reducing misconduct in the banking, superannuation, and financial services industry is a serious concern and not just public posturing.

7.8. Last but not least, I would urge the Royal Commission – rather than adding more regulation that then is likely not enforced – to explore ways to let reputational feedback systems (e.g., Bolton et al MS 2013; see also systems such as TripAdvisor or Serviceseeking.com.au) work their magic. Considerably more transparency, and data, should be provided to the public to let interested researchers identify anomalies and developments that might be otherwise go unnoticed too long. Take the fascinating Figure 3 in the Productivity Commission’s April 2018 draft report on Superannuation: Assessing Efficiency and Competitiveness. Making that data available in a timely fashion would do wonders for the alignment of incentives. No traditional regulatory action I can think of would have the same effect.

References

Abeler et al. (2014), Representative evidence on lying costs. Journal of Public Economics pp. 96 – 104.

Abeler et al. (forthcoming), Preferences for truth-telling. Econometrica forthcoming.

Bolton et al. (2013), Engineering Trust: Reciprocity in the Production of Reputation Information. Management Science pp. 265 – 85.

Capraro (2018), Gender Differences in lying in sender-receiver games: A meta-analysis. Judgement and Decision Making pp. 345 – 55.

Dana et al. (2007), Exploiting moral wiggle room: experiments demonstrating an illusory preference for fairness. Economic Theory pp. 67 – 80.

Gentilin (2016), The Origins of Ethical Failures. Lessons for Leaders. Routledge.

Heck et al. (2018), Who lies? A large-scale reanalysis linking basic personality traits to unethical decision making. Judgement and Decision Making pp. 356 – 71

Huck et al. (2014), Two Are Few and Four Are Many: Number Effects in Experimental Oligopolies. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization pp. 435 – 46.

Irvine (2018), ‘Stop being bastards’: how the royal commission could reform banks. Sydney Morning Herald 22 September.

Johnson & Mislin (2011), Trust Games: A Meta-analysis. Journal of Economic Psychology pp. 865 – 89.

Kajackaite & Gneezy (2017), Incentives and cheating. Games and Economic Behavior p. 433 – 44.

Ortmann et al. (2000), Trust, Reciprocity, and Social History: A Re-examination. Experimental Economics pp. 81 – 100.

Rosenbaum et al. (2014), Let’s be honest: A review of experimental evidence of honesty and truth-telling. Journal of Economic Psychology 181 – 96.

Taguchi & Kamijo (2018), Intentions behind disclosure to promote trust under short-terminism: An experimental study. Kochi University of Technology working paper.

Van Koten & Ortmann (2017), Self-regulatory organizations under the shadow of governmental oversight: An experimental investigation. In: Deck et al. (2017), Experiments in Organizational Economics, Research in Experimental Economics 19, 85 – 104.

Comments welcome.

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Ethical failures: Where they come from and how to address them

A review of

Gentilin, Dennis. The Origins of Ethical Failures. Lessons for Leaders. A Gower Book. Routledge (2016). ISBN: 978-1-138-69051-6

Ethical failures were in the press big-time in 2017. Prominently, creeps like Harvey Weinstein, James Toback, Bill Cosby, Larry Nassar, etc. were accused of sexual transgressions of various sorts (and in some cases admitted them to varying degrees). The sheer number of accusations leaves little doubt that, in their substance, they are correct. One thing that was truly shocking, on top of the specifics of many of the allegations, was that some of these transgressions went on for literally decades, that many people seem to have known about them for years (if not decades), and that the perpetrators did get away with them for an unconscionably long time. It is clear that organizational failures must have played a major role. This was implicitly acknowledged in the name of The Royal Commision (RC) into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, established under the Gillard government in 2013 and which reported all 17 volumes of its findings on December 15, 2017. The RC also laid out recommendations.

It did not really come as a surprise that once again massive organizational failure, in particular of the Catholic Church, was identified as a major finding. It did not come as a surprise because for years there had been a never-ending stream of trials, not just in Australia, suggesting just that, and providing plenty of evidence that the Catholic Church – in its (continued) belief that it is a law and world unto itself — had engaged for decades in what might generously be called economy with the truth.

Two weeks earlier, after another year of numerous reports of questionable practices, and record profits of the four major banks, the Turnbull government saw itself forced — by its own backbenchers, no less — to announce that it would establish a RC into misconduct in the banking industry. It was a step that Labor and the Greens had urged for more than a year. (The recent draft report of the Productivity Commission has made clear that some such RC is indeed overdue.) The Turnbull government’s acceptance of something that it could not prevent, and its subsequent attempts to undermine the effectiveness of the RC by simultaneously widening its scope and imposing an essentially unrealistic timeline, demonstrates, at the minimum, the kind of myopic opportunism that Australian politics seems drenched in.

Having graduated in 2001, Gentilin became a member of the FX trading desk of the National Australian Bank (NAB), one of the four major banks. In 2004 that trading desk became involved in a trading scandal that rocked NAB and led, within a couple of weeks, to the resignation of both its chairman and CEO, the reconfiguration of the board of directors, and significant financial and reputational losses. Gentilin was the young trader who blew the whistle. Contrary to many other whistleblowers (who are typically harrassed out of the organizations on which they blew the whistle), he stayed with NAB for more than a decade – as head of the institutional sales team and a member of the corporate strategy team — before he resigned in January 2016 to found Human Systems Advisory, a name meant to be programmatic. The foreword of his book was written by the current chairman of NAB who states: “There are no simple answers in this book. But there are answers. And there are important truths, supported by deep and rigorous analysis. These should be of interest to all corporate leaders, in both executive and non-executive roles.” (p. xvi). One such truth, says the chairman – apparently quoting Gentilin – is that “leaders must strive to articulate a meaningful social purpose for their organizations that is underpinned by a virtuous set of values.” That’s quite a mouthful, and the impending Royal Commission on the banking system suggests strongly that the major banks (that tried at first to fight off the RC until they realized that fight had been lost) have continuing trouble to understand that particular message, as does the recent draft of the related Productivity Commission report.

Below, I am interested in both the depth and rigor of the analysis and the truths that Gentilin establishes. I am also interested in the implementability of the measures that he proposes.

In his Introduction, Gentilin states that he draws his evidence from “behavioural business ethics” which he defines as the intersection of business ethics and psychology (p. 5). While he is credited on his website with a degree in psychology, Gentilin makes clear that he wrote this book as a “practitioner” rather than “an academic, a philosopher or an ethicist” (p. 4). He does so in four chapters that explore “The Power of Context”, “Group Dynamics”, “Our Flawed Humanity”, and “What We Fail to See”. A conclusion follows.

Gentilin relies heavily on summaries of articles from psychology that explore human nature and the circumstances under which nice behaviour might turn into, well, not so nice behaviour of different shades. While there is brief perfunctionary nod (p. 3) to the replicability crisis that has afflicted psychology, throughout the book there is little discussion of relevant laboratory design and implementation issues such as incentivisation, experimenter expectancy effects, external validity, and so on (Hertwig & Ortmann 2001; Ortmann 2005). Never mind the fact that much of the evidence on unethical behaviour paraded in this book has been produced with deceptive practices, arguably an unethical practice itself (Ortmann & Hertwig 2002; Hertwig & Ortmann 2008). There is no discussion of statistical issues such (lack of) power computations, p-hacking, publication biases, and what not here either.

Claiming that “explanations of unethical conduct rarely give proper consideration to the system within which people operate … (and) tend to focus on identifying ‘bad apples’ or ‘rogues’” (p. 7), in Chapter 1, Gentilin explores how the environment can impact human (mis)behaviour and, on balance, concludes that “the ‘barrel’ within which the ‘bad apples’ operate must be given as much (if not more) attention as the ‘bad apples’ themselves.” (p. 8). Before he reviews the lessons to be learned from the Stanford Prison Experiment, Gentilin reviews literature on social norms and how they affect behaviour. The well-known Cialdini et al. littering and Mazar et al. (dis)honesty studies are paraded, as is an interesting lab study by MacNeil & Sherif (1976) in which the authors demonstrate generational transfer of (questionable) practices, and a related field study by Pierce & Snyder (2008). Distinguishing between descriptive (“derived from what is”) and injunctive (“derived from what ought to be”) norms, Gentilin documents cases where unethical descriptive norms tear to smithereens injunctive ones. He relates this to his reading of what led to the FX trading scandal at the NAB: “young people in particular are vulnerable and endorsing immoral social norms … In the FX trading scandal that engulfed the NAB, immoral social norms emerged that promoted excessive risk taking and misstating the true value of the currency options portfolio.” (pp. 18 – 19). This is hardly surprising, and indeed Gentilin mentions the LIBOR rate-fixing scandal and the professional cycling drug-taking as other high-visibility events. He could have also mentioned the lending practices of major US banks before the housing and mortgage crises (e.g., Gjerstad & Smith 2014), the despicable transgressions at Abu Ghraib, or zillions of other real-world examples. After having reviewed the Stanford Prison experiment in some detail, Gentilin identifies two important take-home lessons from it: first, a specific context “can cause people of sound character to behave in totally uncharacteristic and inappropriate ways.” (p. 24) and, second, the emergence of such contexts is possible only when leaders allow it. Drawing on more experimental evidence (such as Bandura’s children imitating adults’ behaviour experiments), he suggests the obvious parallel for what happened at NAB: “Just as the adults were the role models in Bandura’s experiments, leaders that control the bases of power are the role models in large organizations. For these leaders there will inevitably appear some key moments where, through their actions, choices and decisions, they will send powerful messages that shape the ethical climate for their organizations and types of social norms that emerge. … how a leader responds in these ‘defining moments’ shapes the ‘character of their companies’.” (p. 30). Only leaders who are veritable role models will be able to prevent formal mechanism being eroded by informal mechanisms that hammer away at them. Again, Gentilin suggests that such failure of leadership is what happened at NAB and at the Barclays Bank during the LIBOR rate-fixing schedule, and for that matter in the phone-hacking scandal that led to the demise of News of the World. Gentilin concludes the chapter with a list of “ten questions for senior leaders within any organization” (pp. 37 – 38). Presumably, these questions are unlikely to be answered in an honest manner where it matters. It is the evidence accumulated in this chapter but also elsewhere (Dana et al. 2007 comes to mind, or Miller & Ross 1976) that suggests that much.

Gentilin starts off Chapter 2 with a Nietzsche quotation that sets the stage: “Madness is the exception in individuals but the rule in groups.” (p. 45). The basic point made is that group membership can reinforce – cue social media echo chambers – the drifting away from injunctive norms to descriptive ones. Writes he: “In my experience at the NAB, dysfunctional group dynamics in the currency options business played a significant role in promoting the emergence and maintenance of immoral social norms and unethical behaviour [such as flagrant and persistent limit breaches or excessive risk taking, AO]”. To buttress the case, Gentilin presents Milgram’s 1974 obedience studies, as well as Gina Perry’s recent critique of them (Perry 2012) which, in light of considerable supporting evidence of the original studies (e.g., Haslam et al. 2014), he dismissesin their substance. He then highlights what we learn from Milgram’s inclusion of a variation that drew on the group paradigm. That motivates a discussion of the conformity experiments through which Asch (1956) tried to identify the conditions under which participants would contradict a majority. In this context, Gentilin also briefly discusses a between-subjects study by Woodzicka & LeFrance (2001) who had a male interviewer ask female applicants inappropriate questions. The basic result was that 6 out of 10 subjects claimed they would object (hypothetically) but none in the control group refused the answer in a “real-life” scenario. That seems the kind of pattern that allowed the Weinsteins of this world to get their way for too long. Only in the case of Weinstein and similar assholes (here used in the technical sense of Sutton 2007), the stakes were arguably considerably higher. People’s lack of willingness to stand up and be counted is, unfortunately, so widespread that it is well documented and it is a recurrent theme of great movies such as Hidden Figures. Gentilin makes clear that, based on his experience at NAB, “facing the fork in the road in a hypothetical scenario is vastly different from facing it in reality.” (p. 67) He also states, “I am personally sceptical of other research into whistleblowing that focuses on ascertaining the types of personality or dispositional characteristics that may predict whether an observer of wrongdoing will take action and report it. …This line of enquiry fails to properly consider the power of the situation.” (p. 67). Gentilin concludes the chapter with another list of “ten questions for senior leaders (and followers) within any organization” (pp. 73). I doubt that these questions will be answered in an honest manner where it matters, for essentially the exact reason that Gentilin has identified in the chapter.

In Chapter 3, Gentilin – notwithstanding his, in my considered opinion, sensible stand on the relative importance of context and dispositional characteristics – dives into “our flawed humanity”. Programmatically, he starts with an epigraph featuring a quotation from Kant, “Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing has ever been made.” (p. 80). Gentilin then tries to answer questions such as “Are Humans Self-Interested?”, cursorily sampling evidence from experimental economics, neuroscience, and evolutionary biology. Predictably he concludes that this research shows that “human nature (is) far different from the one suggested by the axiom of self-interest” (p. 86), though he qualifies the statement with the caveat that we are not always altruistic and cooperative. This alleged “paradigm shift” (p. 87) is, unfortunately, the major bone of contention between those marketing Behavioural Economics (and often shamelessly benefitting from it) and those doing Experimental Economics, and I believe that the social-preferences literature that has created it has as much merits as the IN oxytocin, ego depletion, and power poses research now, for all I can see, thoroughly debunked. Better not plan your life, or organization, on such flimsy evidence. From an evidence point of view, and also a theory point of view (e.g., the important insights stemming from repeated game situations), this chapter is the weakest. Gentilin’s sampling of the evidence strikes me as scattershot and unsystematic. After discussions of issues such as power and its corrupting influence and fear and awareness of our own mortality that feeds into it, Gentilin concludes the chapter with a list of “eleven questions for senior leaders within any organization” (pp. 118) I fear, these questions, again, are unlikely to be answered in an honest manner where it matters.

In Chapter 4, Gentilin starts with a quotation from Kahneman’s best-seller Thinking Fast and Slow: “We can be blind to the obvious, and we can also be blind to our blindness.” This double-whammy – a variant of the Dunning – Krueger effect — is why questions to senior leaders are unlikely to be answered honestly and self-critically. After a brief mention of another persistent bone of contention – the System 1 / System 2 delineation – and our alleged propensity to rely too much on automatic system 1 which makes us, presumably, liable to various biases (in this chapter loss aversion, framing, overconfidence, moral disengagement, euphemistic labelling), Gentilin lays out the slippery-slope argument that in his view was at the heart of the events that led to the NAB trading scandal: “The FX trading incident at the NAB classically illustrated the slippery slope in action. Not only did ethical standards erode over time, but the seriousness of the ethical transgressions accelerated … “ (p. 130). Laboratory evidence is provided to make that point (e.g., the interesting Gino & Bazerman 2008 study) along with field evidence from the NAB case (pp. 131). An intervention discussed here is to give people more time and essentially get them to break out of their System 1 mode: “There are now numerous studies that illustrate how providing a person with more time whenever they are confronted with an ethical dilemma tends to lead to a more virtuous decision being made.” (pp. 146-7). I have serious doubt about the relevance of, say, the Good-Samaritian study mentioned here for real-world decision making and suspect that a theoretical grounding in organizational economics and repeated game theory would really help to address the challenges that organizations and their leaders face.

Gentilin concludes his book with a plea for more (business ethics) education, a call for the installation of Chief Ethics Officers, and more Lessons for Leaders. He wants business schools to challenge their students intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually. That sounds like something straight out of a high-gloss advertisement such schools produce. The reality, however, of Australian business schools (and undoubtedly business schools everywhere) is that they are rarely intellectually demanding. Their inability to challenge their students emotionally and spiritually is shown effectively by their treatment of casuals and staff. What business schools typically do not have are, in particular, truly independent ethics officers, and HR departments, that could hold the feet of currently widely unaccountable senior leadership to the fire. So, while the idea of a Chief Ethics Officer, who has “a genuine ‘seat at the table’” (p. 161), and is independent, able to freely raise matters of concern, and able to freely “speak truth to power” (p. 161), is conceptually on the money, realistically it is very unlikely to be implemented any time soon, as are truly independent HR departments. As to Lessons for Leaders, Gentilin wants them to be virtuous in the sense of having some community-oriented values. There is a lot of wishful thinking on display here (e.g., that others are willing to take the same risks that he took in 2004) but I think, after everything we learned through the flurry of recent examples mentioned at the beginning of this review, there is not much reason for hope. Even something that should have been uncontroversial, such as the Royal Commission on banking, and the way it came about, demonstrates that common ground is hard to find and cannot be relied on. I fear much harder thinking will be needed to address ethical failures and I fear some strategies will be of the innovative kind provided by the #MeToo campaign that not only has brought down some true monsters but is likely to have changed power and gender relations in the working world irreversibly.

In summary then, Gentilin tackles arguably the most important issue of our times – ethical failures within organizations and for that matter ethical failures more generally. His book is strongest where he illustrates the emergence of his insights with examples from his own NAB 2004 experience. His illustration of various arguments he makes with evidence from behavioural business ethics is wanting. As pointed out above, to his credit Gentilin himself – although unaware of important methodological debates among psychologists as well as between psychologists and economists – grasps intuitively the lack of external validity of some of the evidence that he presents and it is clear that his NAB 2004 experience has been a good guide to identify which laboratory evidence has some external validity, and which does not. I think the book could be considerably improved with a more even-handed and complete assessment of the evidence from psychology and other social sciences (and here in particular economics) as well as an additional focus on incentive-compatible organizational design. To rely on business ethics education in business schools (whether in Australia or elsewhere) or a sense of community oriented-ness of business leaders is just not going to cut the mustard, as the widely perceived need for the Royal Commission in the banking system demonstrates.

Having recently interacted with NAB, once again, with mortgage related issues, I have no doubt that NAB culture is pervaded with everything but a meaningful social purpose that is underpinned by a virtuous set of values (e.g., the loan officer I dealt with did everything to prevent me from comparison shopping, and essentially gave me misleading information about the rates that I would be getting), and I have little doubt that the same applies to each of the other three major banks. There is a reason why the major banks in Australia have had outsized profits and some of the highest returns on equity in the world. The recent draft of the related Productivity Commission report spells them out.

I appreciate Dennis Gentilin’s comments on a draft of this review.

How to tax the platform economy?

In the engine room of nation states, ie the tax departments, the coming battle with platform providers is taking shape. Uber, airbnb, facebook, linkedin, ebay, jobseek, and a myriad of specialised platform providers facilitate micro-trades that are largely untaxed by the authorities. In stead, the platform providers themselves take a cut, partially via advertising and partially via a direct fee for their services. They have taken over an activity that has mainly been provided by governments in the past: places to trade. The town square, the stock exchange, public infrastructure, and the unemployment office are relics of a past where governments were market providers that facilitated trades. Now, it is largely private companies with tax-avoidance structures that have taken on this role on the internet. That role is set to expand hugely.

This is a crucial battle that, so far, the tax authorities are losing because they have not yet grasped the magnitude of the shift. They lack the key new power that they must attain: the power to deny the operation of a platform provider in their country.

At the moment, tax authorities around the world, lead by the Scandinavians whose tax needs are high, are going the usual ‘reporting route’. They are trying to get Uber, Airbnb, and all the other ones to report the trades and the value of the trades that they have facilitated. Understandably, these companies are refusing to play ball because they of course are taxing the same trades themselves in a different way. They are competing with national tax authorities and hence their business model depends on tax evasion, so of course they refuse to help their competitors. Their lawyers make millions from refusing to play ball. The horror example for these companies is the 2015 data on Uber that had to be released to the Dutch tax authorities and that was subsequently shared with Denmark which promptly went after the drivers for added tax payments. This reflected the circumstance that the administration of Uber was in the Netherlands at that time, which allowed the Dutch to force Uber to hand over some of their data, a mistake Uber wont make again. The others too will have learned a salutary lesson from that episode.

Frustrated, the tax authorities are turning to pretty hopeless measures, such as new international treaties on the reporting of micro-trades by private entities. In a race to the bottom between countries trying to attract large companies, that is just a hopeless avenue where the authorities will always be many steps behind the tax-advisers of the big trading platforms.

What are the next moves we might then see when the tax authorities get up to speed? I think two developments are likely: full internet observation by national agencies and government-lead internet firms.

Full internet observation follows the model of China, which now has the capacity to track most of the internet activity of most of the population. That allows it to observe the trades facilitated on internet platforms, which in turn can be used for tax purposes. Those observations can be used to directly go after individual traders or can be used to go after the platform providers, simply by making their activities illegal if the platforms do not assist in tax observations. Adopting the China route would spell the end of internet privacy, but it probably works. And tax is such a key part of the nation state that it in the end trumps privacy concerns.

The second possibility is for the government to re-enter the market for platforms and set up its own internet firms for micro-trades and social media. It can simply copy the best examples on the internet for how to set these things up. The transition will come with losses, but authorities can appeal to national pride to get support from their populations and companies cannot compete with that. For micro-trades within a country or tax region (the US and, in the future, the EU) that should work. For international trades, one should expect more difficulties because government-backed firms from different countries might then directly compete with each other, which in turn might lead to competency battles and new dispute resolution mechanisms.

Is cross-ownership a competition problem in Australia?

Possibly.

First some context. I raised this issue a couple of years ago in a post here. It was motivated by new research in the US on the impact of cross-ownership by institutional investors on competition in US airlines.

So ask yourself: when those shareholders vote on the composition of boards or the management of the firm, or, importantly how the management of the firm is compensated, are they going to vote for managers who will care only about the profits of the firm they manage or about the profits more broadly? The answer is obvious: they will look to managers who manage in the interest of shareholders and so that means they care about all firm profits and not just the one of their own firm.

In a world where shareholders can get what they want, we won’t have competition in this outcome but, more likely, a collusive outcome. What is more, the firms won’t have to go to all the difficulty of violating antitrust laws to obtain this outcome, they will do it unilaterally. There are no laws against that.

That research was recently updated but has also been extended to banks and also executive compensation consistent with a competition-reducing effect (compensation is based on absolute rather than relative performance).

In an op ed, Shadow Assistant Treasurer and my long-standing co-author, Andrew Leigh, took the US approach and applied it to Australia. He looked at cross-ownership patterns but he made a mistake looking at custodial firms (who don’t have voting or influence rights) rather than the core institutional investors that are the core of the theory. Peter Martin pointed out the error. Who knew that determining ownership could be so complicated?

This of course highlights how difficult it is for politicians to research and make arguments. One little error and it is as if the whole hypothesis doesn’t exist any more. But we academics in the real world don’t operate that way. What I wondered was: do the patterns we see in the US match occur in Australia.

Fortunately, for me, I didn’t have to do much heavy lifting to find out. Here are some summary stats provided on Twitter by Martin Schmalz who is a key player in the US studies. First, let’s check out energy retailing:

martincschmalz_2017-Mar-16 3.jpg

The top three investors are the same across the two biggest competitors in Australia.

Let’s turn to grocery and other retailing:

Wesfarmers (who owns Coles) and Woolworths have some similarities there.

Or petrol:

Or investing itself:

martincschmalz_2017-Mar-16 1.jpg

For banking in general, I took a look and NAB’s top shareholders are (Vanguard 2.03% and BlackRock 1.43% and Capital Research and Management Company, 1.13%); Commonwealth Bank has (Vanguard 2.78%, BlackRock 1.46% and Govt Pension Fund of Norway, 0.88%), while Westpac appears to have little shareholder concentration.

Looking at telecommunications we have Telstra (Capital Research and Management Company, 1.13%; Vanguard 1.62%, BlackRock 0.63%) while Singtel is owned by the Singapore government.

This is, of course, far from a comprehensive concern but the pattern is interesting. The very funds — BlackRock and Vanguard — whose ownership changes were related to competition reductions in the US by research there have the same pattern of ‘diversified’ holdings in Australian oligopoly companies.

Now you might say that even so, the ownership of the largest shareholders is low. That is true. It is not like they themselves command a majority for voting purposes. However, as the largest shareholders they have power and their trading behaviour can impact on the returns of others. The very fact that we see cross-ownership patterns in Australia similar to the US where there are concerns that have been measured suggests that this is something we need to watch.

Are we kidding ourselves on competition?

The traditional textbook model of competition in an oligopoly goes likes this. Firms choose prices and other variables (like product quality, advertising and R&D) to maximise their own profits and disregard the impact of their actions on (a) competing firms and (b) consumers; although with the latter since they want them to buy products they aren’t completely immune to their welfare. This model is essentially unquestioned but, in reality, it relies on a view of firm ownership that is markedly different from corporate reality. In particular, large firms are owned by shareholders (who may also be their consumers) but, more importantly, may be the shareholders of their competitors as well.

Let’s start with that latter notion. What it means is that the presumption that firms maximise their profits independent of their consideration for the impact on profits of competing firms is surely suspect. And it is disturbingly suspect. Consider a situation where there are 10 firms in a market and they compete with one another. Now suppose that all shareholders — say because they are following the dicta of diversification — allocate their wealth in equal proportion across those 10 firms. That means that each owner of the firm — even if there are thousands of these — cares equally about each firm’s profits.

So ask yourself: when those shareholders vote on the composition of boards or the management of the firm, or, importantly how the management of the firm is compensated, are they going to vote for managers who will care only about the profits of the firm they manage or about the profits more broadly? The answer is obvious: they will look to managers who manage in the interest of shareholders and so that means they care about all firm profits and not just the one of their own firm.

In a world where shareholders can get what they want, we won’t have competition in this outcome but, more likely, a collusive outcome. What is more, the firms won’t have to go to all the difficulty of violating antitrust laws to obtain this outcome, they will do it unilaterally. There are no laws against that.

To see how that might arise, think about, oh I don’t know, Comcast and Time Warner. These are cable companies/ISPs who are the largest of their kind in the US. I suspect that there is lots of cross ownership of mutual funds of each of these. Why? Because they happen to each focus on different regions in the US and so any mutual fund worth their salt would want to diversify their portfolio to hedge geographic risk. And so ask yourself: how readily would the boards of those companies improve massive infrastructure investments to expand the reach of their networks into the territory of the other? With cross-ownership, they wouldn’t have a powerful incentive. (Actually, we can now just add that to the list).

Now this isn’t just speculation. Jose Azar, an economist now at Charles River Associates, did his Princeton PhD on this topic. His theory paper is here and it builds on others including Gordon (1990), Hansen and Lott (1995) and O’Brien and Salop (2000). Frank Wolak and I came up with a similar set of issues related to cross-ownership and hedging in electricity markets (for vertical ownership) and verified anti-competitive consequences arising from this. But Azar, along with Martin Schmalz and Isabel Tecu have demonstrated that cross-ownership has anti-competitive impacts on the US airline industry. They find that cross ownership increases US airline prices 3–5%. When they use the event whereby BlackRock acquired Barclays Global Investors (a merger changing the shares of common ownership in airlines), they found such ownership could indicate 10% bumps in pricing with US airline ticket prices rising by 0.6% as a result of that merger alone.

In Slate, Eric Posner and Glen Weyl took these results to their logical conclusion: that we should consider banning mutual funds or anyone from holding shares in competing companies. This confounded and shocked the Financial Times’ Matthew Klein but he clearly was struggling to understand the basic industrial economics of the situation and also the power of Azar et.al.’s empirical findings.

In reality, the Posner-Weyl policy is on the risk averse side of the equation. Shareholders influence companies by voting and so it is the median voter who matters. In this regard, so long as 51% of shares in companies are owned by funds or people who do not have shares in competitors, we don’t need to be concerned. Of course, how we think about a policy that restricts competitive cross ownership remains an issue here but this is, at least, a softer place to start. My guess, however, is that we can come up with a formula for sufficient asymmetries in cross ownership to assure us that any anti-competitive hanky panky isn’t going on.

But there is another issue which I believe is likely to be more related and of importance for the wealth inequality and power story that Posner and Weyl concern themselves with: i.e., that wealthy shareholders are likely to exercise market power and harm consumers overall. That issue is that the relationship between the distribution of shareholders and the distribution of consumption across firms will be important. As Joe Farrell (1985) pointed out in 1985, if firms are owned by shareholders in equal proportion to their consumption levels, then shareholders would vote to self-regulate any firm’s market power (see also Mas-Colell and Silvestre (1991)). This would be a great outcome and would apply even if the shareholders had holdings across competing firms. Of course, the distribution of wealth is actually more uneven than the distribution of consumption, so this great outcome is unlikely to arise. However, thinking about shareholders more fully will lead us to consider these ownership issues and how they relate to market power more extensively.

The point here is that we cannot really ignore this issue as economists or as policy-makers. We have “known” about it for decades. Now’s the time to take it seriously.

Are there unhelpful mathematical models of economic phenomena?

Take your bog-standard first-year economics story of why money (sea shells, coins, notes, bank statements) exist. Money, you will be told, is a means of exchange, a store of value, and a unit of accounting, thoughts going back to David Hume (18th century) and earlier.

When explaining the idea of exchange to students you say things like ‘you can’t exchange a hundredth of a sheep for a loaf of bread so you want something to represent the value of a hundredth of a sheep, and in any case it’s a long slog to the market carrying a sheep around’.

When explaining the idea of a store of value you say things like ‘You would like to be able to consume things when you are old without working when you are old. That means you need to save up wealth in the form of something that doesn’t perish. Sheep perish, gold does not’; and when explaining the unit of value idea you say things like ‘we all think of the value of things in terms of a numeraire, such as that milk costs 1 dollar per liter and flour 2 dollars a kilo. None of us think in terms of 1 liter of milk being worth half a kilo of flour. Given many different products, it is more convenient to think of the value of each of them in terms of something you can compare across these goods. Money performs that role and you will find that even when the unit of money changes (such as moves from the Deutschmark to the Euro) that people will continue to calculate everything back in terms of the old money for many years’.
Simple stories, no? And most students will ‘get the point’ of each of these three stories. They will see the difficulties of exchange with lumpy goods that cannot easily be stored and exchanged, and they will see the point of being able to save up for a later date and that requires some form of storable money.

Simple though these arguments are, you will be hard-pressed to find mathematical models of them that anyone would recognise as remotely capturing these verbal arguments. It tells you something about the limits of mathematical models to think through why recognisable models of money do not exist. So bear with me as I take you through the actual difficulties of modelling money and how those difficulties end up as unhelpful advise from theoretical economists to policy makers.Think of the actual difficulties involved in modelling the story of money as a medium of exchange. Before even thinking about money, you have to start from a model with exchange. This means you need to model the production of more than one good and you must build in a reason, like comparative advantage, why individuals do not simply produce all the goods they need by themselves. For realism you would want the goods to be lumpy, perishable, and to require long-term investments. After all, sheep herding and crop-growing do not happen overnight and neither sheep nor apples can meaningfully be stored for very long or exchanged in halves.
You immediately hit your first mathematical snag right there: if production is lumpy (you can’t produce half-apples), then you won’t get the simple outcome that someone will spend all his time on what he is best at. An individual could optimally spend his time by producing one sheep and two apples even though he has a comparative advantage in sheep, simply because he can’t make exactly two sheep. If you want lumpiness in your model, you thus would have to solve the problem of how a person would optimally allocate a fixed amount of time over lumpy investment projects. This is known in the Operations Research literature as the knap-sack problem (in which you need to decide which lumpy goods to put into a knapsack of particular size) and it is known to be an ‘NP-hard’ problem. Simply put, you know of such problems that there is a single optimal solution but it may take a long time to actually find it. Solving just that knapsack problem for a single individual is already something that may take a computer years if you choose the bundle of potential goods to be large enough, and there will be cases in which you will find that even with comparative advantage the sheep herders may grow enough apples to not need exchange.
How do you solve that snag, which incidentally arises in all models of production? The reality is that you don’t because solving just that one leaves you with a model in which you can solve little else and in which you are not assured of any real impetus for exchange. Hence you ‘simplify reality’. You thus presume that there is no such thing as a lumpy good and that people spend their time producing a ‘continuous’ amount of goods, say, 3.271 sheep or 14.231 apples. Without lumpiness, people will specialise in making one thing and have a reason to trade. Note that you thus have already given up on describing the most intuitive reasons for having money around: you can no longer meaningfully talk about the difficulties of exchanging a hundredth of a sheep for half an apple since you now have presumed a world in which you produce sheep in hundredths and apples in halves.
Moving on, the next modelling problem you hit is that it must be the case that different individuals happen to want what the other produces, a ‘coincidence of wants’. Indeed, you want some kind of place (a market) where people come to exchange what they have produced. In model-land you must answer every counter-factual. You must thus have a reason why traders would use money instead of giving each other credit or just exchanging bundles of good (since goods are now not lumpy, you can just go to the market with your 2/3 sheep and exchange it in one big free-for-all for all the goods you need). Such thoughts may sound absurd to you, but working them through has occupied really good mathematicians for years. It is in fact nigh impossible to solve models in which people do not know exactly beforehand what will happen in a market.

You see, as soon as you say that a person does not know beforehand what other people have produced and at what prices they might trade, you are in the world of limited information and in the world where it is possible that people make mistakes (go to the market empty handed, produce the wrong things, etc.). You are then in the business of having to specify how people form expectations about what others would do and what prices they would trade at.

You are then also in the business of working out whether there are perhaps multiple equilibria (i.e. different configurations of the whole economy) and the issue of how people who don’t know each other could actually coordinate on a particular configuration. You then for instance have to contend with the possibility that nobody shows up at the market because they expect nobody else to show up. You have to contend with the possibility that you get the wrong prices, under which there is no specialisation at all.

You have to contend with the problem that the only people to show up wouldn’t want to trade with each other because they have produced the same thing and you have to figure out how a group of people would actually arrive at a price (or prices). Each of these sub-problems is considered exceptionally hard by theorists: only under very specific mathematical assumptions can you be absolutely guaranteed that the problems above do not occur.
Hence, what do you do? Well, again, the reality is that you assume away all these problems. You simply make those assumptions that guarantee you that everyone who produces something is ‘magically’ matched up with someone else who has something they want to trade with. Also, you now presume the existence of some kind of all-powerful benevolent entity, say god. You need such an entity to do away with elements in your model you cannot model but need anyway, such as how prices arise before any exchange takes place (if prices change during exchange one gets into exceptionally complicated dynamics where you need to start talking about the expectations that people have of possible price paths). So you invent a god that takes care of such issues. God, in his first incarnation as a Walrasian auctioneer, announces the prices at which everyone is willing to trade, whereby everyone believes god and acts accordingly. God, now in his second role as a benevolent and completely trusted government, then also provides a means of exchange that is not perishable, i.e. money.

Usually, a third sleight of hand is needed to get a workable model and that is to have a situation in which there is no such thing as a mistake because there is no such thing as expectations that are incorrect. This of course basically presumes away the original problem you were starting out to model, but that is an almost inevitable casualty of the wish to have a tractable economic model.

What kind of models of money do we end up with? To my taste, the best that mathematicians have come up with is the story that some sheep producers have a craving for eating apples in the night, but they are themselves just innately incapable of producing apples and their sheep always die at the end of the day (i.e. they must be eaten before the end of the day. New ones are only born at the start of the next day). This means that the sheep herder must sell his sheep during the day to the apple maker whilst buying the apples during the night (apples also perish at the end of each half day so he can’t trade during the day). In a modelling sense, that ensures you the ‘coincidence of wants’ you need to have a role for exchange and ensures that sheep herders and apple farmers cannot just trade their produce. By assuming that they not trust each other, but that they do trust the provider of money, you ensure that they do not just trade promises but use money for their trades. Within this kind of basic set-up you can even introduce monetary policy in the form of allowing god to hand out more money to specific groups or to reduce the value of the money in circulation. Whole ‘policy edifices’ have been built upon the basic structure of sheep herders having cravings for apples in the night. For those who are interested, I am talking about the model by Lagos and Wright (2005) and the many extensions on their basic idea.
Now, anyone in his right mind would laugh out loud at the story above as it comes nowhere close to the historical stories told about why we have money and what its role is in the economy: big historical problems in the emergence of money concerned the fact that there was no trusted government, and the value of money had a lot to do with the actual costs of information and transportation, costs that the story talked about above had to assume away. Yet the story of apples and sheep above, believe it or not, is one of the dominant stories told in ‘micro-founded’ monetary economics. It is in that kind of model-economy that they talk about money, credit, banks, regulation, etc. If it weren’t for the fact that it is deemed cutting-edge research, you would have to cry.
I hope you will take my word for it that the problems of generating models in which money exists because of savings and as a numeraire good are equally hard to set up and hence such models don’t exist at all as far as I know.
The value of the actual models of money are mainly as proof of concept, i.e. that you can think of a micro-model in which money emerges and where you can base the emergence of money on at least one of the underlying micro-motivations you think are important for the existence of money (the advantage of having a more varied consumption bundle). It is not the model you would have wanted but at least you can have it in the back of your mind as an example of the micro-mechanisms that are relevant.
The problem with the monetary model talked about above is that it fits so poorly. It hardly fits the many historical examples we know of the emergence of money, nor does it capture the problems we face today when thinking about money markets (trust in the institutions, the incentive problems inside organisations, the investment problem). Hence it is singularly unsuitable to use as a mental laboratory for the policy problems of today, or even as a descriptive model of the actual roles of money in our economy.

The problem of poor fit carries over to unhelpful advise: despite the fact that it is such a poor fit to reality, it is the only ‘game in town’ when it comes to micro-models of money. A most unfortunate and destructive phenomenon then appears, which is that the only game in town becomes the truth to a whole set of people making their careers on the back of it.

All the potential advantages of models become a disadvantage when a poorly-fitting model is taken too seriously. One potential advantage of models is that they can be the codification of previous knowledge and as such a good model is a quick way of conveying a lot of knowledge to the next generation who don’t have to learn what reasons went into the construction of the model in the first place.

This now becomes a disadvantage: the new generation that looks to write papers ‘on money’ need know nothing about the history of money or its uses today but only need know the dominant model, which turns into a disadvantage because that new generation will come up with twists and extensions of something that is innately unsuitable to answer any interesting question. Yet that new generation will be blissfully ignorant of the uselessness of what they are doing because they, unlike the originators of the first models on money, will lack the historical database in their heads of what actually goes on. They are simply proving their worth by being more acquainted with the mathematical ins and outs of these models than anyone else and that is what supplies them their daily dinner, not whether the model is useful to anyone else.

Another potential advantage of a good model is that you can make consistent statements instead of waffling on incoherently. One real advantage of model-land is that it is fairly easy to spot someone who is not capable of understanding models. This advantage also becomes a disadvantage in a model that fits poorly because you will see a great proliferation of consistent statements that are based on poor abstractions of real phenomena. You might term this the proliferation of ‘precisely wrong’ statements.

And it is a cop-out to say that these precisely wrong statements are not intended to be taken literally: despite being mere models, the adherents deliberately use words that convey its supposed usefulness, such as monetary policy, government, banks, etc. The pretense of usefulness pervades each paper and each grant proposal using these models. Worse still, that modelling community is a group with a big incentive to pretend that the assumptions made for convenience are ‘actually true’, i.e. it is a constituency of individuals with an incentive to presume there is no such thing as transaction costs or a trust problem when it comes to money. When such people become important they will poo poo those who make different assumptions and force them to first invest in their models. In short, a poor model that is taken seriously becomes a part of the problem.

Would you also have the same problems if monetary economics were mainly based on a set of historical case studies and an awareness of the problems faced today by economic actors? Unlikely, because you then at least have set up an ultimate goal of the discipline, which is to understand how the world came to be as it is and to help economic actors shape their world to their advantage, i.e. you are grounding your discipline in historical reality and real world problems. Having said this, one should not be blind to the disadvantage of a more verbal discipline though. The disadvantage is that when knowledge consists of a collection of examples and lessons, there is more room for the wafflers of this world to ply their trade, and there are millions of eager wafflers around.

Are there any good economic models you might ask? I believe there are and my prime example would be Industrial Organisation models of competition and market interaction. These are the Cournot models, Stackleberg models, models of complementary investments in vertical markets, oligopoly models, models of the internet as a platform, etc. The nice thing about these models is that the motivations they presume of their actors (pure greed) are pretty well spot-on and that it is not that hard in reality to see what kind of market interaction is happening, i.e. which of the I/O models to use.

Though it is hard to measure for a statistician, it is not so hard to spot as a human whether, say, the oil companies are engaging in collusion or not. It is not hard to spot a cartel, or the basic information structure of a market, nor is it hard to spot the structure of investment complementarities. In short, I/O models can do a remarkably good job of describing the particular aspects of reality one can optimally intervene in, which is of course why they are so central to the work of regulation authorities and why, for instance, auction design on the internet is done by mathematically schooled geeks. They need to know nothing of the history of auctions to nevertheless be damned good designers of auctions as long as they understand the models and have learned to spot the market patterns around them.

There are thus good models out there and the groups of disconnected geeks working on extending them are, often to their own surprise, doing something useful with their lives. We wouldn’t want to go back to waffling in those areas. The problem is thus not the existence of mathematical models per se, but rather that there are aspects of economic reality where the best we can do is a bad model.

Is money the only area where we can do no better than bad models that are worse than useless when they are taken seriously? Alas, no. What goes for money goes for many economic phenomena. To have an economic model where growth is driven by specialisation (which is what most historical economists believed was the engine of growth) has so far been beyond us, which is why we have ended up with these ridiculous representative agent models. What the pragmatists believe is true about specialisation can’t be modelled by the best minds in math econ land (this is not to say there are no models of specialisation, simply none that get close to illuminating the path-dependence, trust, and institutions that sustain it). Satisfactory ‘des-equilibrium’ models of recessions also simply don’t exist. Models of human behaviour drawing upon more than two of the known ‘irrationalities in our make-up’ are also too hard to solve. The list goes on and on: if one insists on consistent mathematical theorising from ‘micro-foundations’, nearly all of the big drivers of economic growth and economic institutions are beyond our ability to model even remotely realistically.

Mathematical models are hence in many areas a problem because they fit poorly but nevertheless live a life of their own, taking up valuable mental time of smart people, leading individuals to think about the wrong problems, leading people to think in terms of the wrong assumptions, motivating statisticians to measure the wrong things, and divorcing their discipline from reality.

Suppose you believe all this, but nevertheless want to make progress in disciplines by doing proper science, differentiating yourself from the wafflers. What is ‘proper science’ in an area where we cannot make much mathematical headway and hence where we can be reasonably certain that every grand story we tell (in maths or in words) has inconsistent parts to it? That’s the subject of a future blog….

Competition on the islands

There are some famous models in economics based on island economies. Usually, that is a metaphor for issues of transportation costs and restrictions on the flow of goods and information. You may not have realised this but there are islands in the real world. Between England and France there are several known as the ‘Channel Islands.’ I learned this week that they are not part of the United Kingdom but operate under similar laws and monarchy but are somewhat independent. So independent that each island has its own competition authority.

As it turns out, the Deputy Head of the Jersey Competition Authority is an Australian by the name of Andrew Riseley. I met Andrew at a conference this week where he disabused me of my ignorance regarding the scope of competition issues that they face there on Jersey. In fact, a look at their active issues and it could read just like the ACCC. From fuel to post to reducing the costs of switching your broadband provider (and yes, if Jersey can have choice surely Australia can have that too).

Now, as with all such things, I believe that the criteria imposed by Norm from Cheers applies: the things that will get attention and scrutiny are anything that could result in a change in the price of beer. So Andrew’s hot issue at the moment is the proposed acquisition by the Liberation Pub Company of one of the main wholesale alcoholic beverage distributors on Jersey. He told me that that acquisition as already been moved to their Phase Two process which I take to mean that Andrew will spend more time on it. I think competition authorities around the world dealing with the politics of that industry will be watching island developments closely.

Gender and Competition

My AFR op-ed today is on gender and competition, writing up a series of recent research papers. It would’ve been too cumbersome to mention all the authors, but you’ll find the studies hyperlinked if you’d like to read the original research. Full text over the fold. And of course, please remember that authors don’t choose their headlines.

Continue reading “Gender and Competition”

Broken record on bank switching

… both sounding like one and government policy. Usual scenario: (1) RBA changes interest rates, (2) banks immediate react but don’t do the same thing — almost always passing on less or, apparently, taking more — (3) Treasurer says consumers should use their feet and switch banks; (4) consumers work out that is costly; (5) journalists call me to so I can be quoted saying the same thing; (6) nothing gets done. Today’s step (5) journalist is Peter Martin.

The problem with bank switching costs is that to minimise them likely requires all banks to implement common standards, technologies and maybe even some new financial products that would enable this. The latter would be, say, mortgage products whereby there is an underlying secured stream of income from the mortgage but when a customer switches, they switch the front end or residual holder of the variable stream of returns as interest rates vary. In each case, it is likely to be better if either (i) the government mandates a right to switch, thereby, forcing banks to work something out or (ii) provides that means of switching themselves. The latter is a structural intervention into the market, not unlike the competition-enhancing policy behind the NBN, that will allow switching to be cheaply implemented. The costs could then be recovered through, say, stamp duty on the loans. Wow, stamp duty actually used to provide something related to the industry rather than a revenue grab from government. How radical is that?

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