Gulnara Nolan

Monopsony employers paying higher wages?!

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As part of my job as a researcher I like to read about different topics – I have done work on health economics, labor economics, and more recently firm recruiting with the use of reverse phone lookups to hire the best employees.  One topic that comes up across all these fields is the idea of a monopsony buyer for different things.

Looking across this blog I’ve seen monopsony discussed in terms of the labour market and in terms of migration and monetary policy.  However, I want to focus on concentration indices (as a proxy for monopsony) and wages.

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Gulnara Nolan

Forward guidance and unconventional monetary policy in NZ?

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Forward guidance and unconventional monetary policy

I recently noticed that swap rates purchases were discussed as an unconventional monetary policy tool are discussed in Reserve Bank’s bulletin “Aspects of implementing unconventional monetary policy in New Zealand”.

Namely, they state:

“Purchasing interest rate swaps could be a way to signal that the Reserve

Bank expects to keep the OCR low for a prolonged period. Swap rates

comprise the expectations of future policy rates, the term risk premium,

and margin for bank credit risk.”

So why would we want to keep OCR persistently low in long-term? Let’s have a closer look at this.

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Matt Nolan

Migration and wages: A model that is wrong but useful

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The link between migration and wages is complex and confusing – especially when it is often communicated about in different ways (eg are we talking about wage growth now with regards to monetary policy, wages in specific industries due to the changing make-up of the economy, or long-run real wages?).  And I can’t be much help here.

However, I think this is one place where carefully using the macroeconomic model taught in ECON101 can help us to think about the issues a little bit – especially if we are narrowing the question to only “what is the monetary policy consequences of changes in migration flows“.  Now this model is wrong, assumptions in it are wrong, the outcomes it describes aren’t forecasts – but it clearly articulates tendencies we observe following a change in economic circumstances which will hold in more realistic models, and clarifies assumptions that may make these tendencies false.  We have pointed at this before for monetary policy – but lets outline a bit more now.

It is a model for thinking about the potential consequences of something in a critical way – not something that we accept uncritically as truth.  To me this is pretty damned useful as a way to start thinking about something, so let’s do it!

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Matt Nolan

Are real wages lower than 40 years ago

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While rolling around the internet I found the following:

Lets have a look shall we.

Interesting!  But something seems a bit off – surely this can’t be true!?  Let us investigate.

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Matt Nolan

Can we blame universities for inequality in educational attainment?

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I can see where this article is coming from.  Inequality in educational attainment can translate into inequality in incomes.  If people from poor households have lower educational attainment then we have a generational link between low incomes, which implies lower income mobility.  This is something that we may find unjust.

Why do I say “may”, well this depends on the cause doesn’t it – why does this inequality exist.

Now I don’t disagree that educational attainment is associated with income inequality, and the narrowing of gaps in educational attainment has been associated with lower income inequality.  I also don’t disagree that, looking at a person in isolation, lower mobility can be associated with lower opportunity.

But I am from a low income area and I am not sure we can blame universities for the fact that they primarily have students from higher deciles.

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Matt Nolan

Wellbeing conference

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Via Motu on Facebook I saw the following.

I had no idea this was going on … even though I saw the flyers all around university advertising it.  I’m working quite long days at the moment so my mind isn’t really all there 😛

However, this looks cool – I’m going to see if I can find some of the related literature and write about it at some point.  I really enjoyed the summary piece by Arthur Grimes in that link, so go take a look at that!  So much to unpack in that, so I’ll leave it for another time 😉