I realized I had switched to GNP and GNP deflator data without having re-fit the data two posts ago. I also show the prediction in linear scale since the log scale did make it the fit with the wrong fit parameter look better than it is. I also mislabeled one axis as NGDP when it is NGNP. So here are pictures that are basically the ones from the last post, except with a new fit, a properly labeled axis (I keep using P as the deflator/price level because that is the variable in the original equations), and also shows a linear scale graph of the GNP deflator prediction:
A working paper exploring the idea that information equilibrium is a general principle for understanding economics. [Here] is an overview.
Friday, July 12, 2013
Thursday, July 11, 2013
Short course on information transfer and the quantity theory
In order to shop around this idea in the blogosphere for real (as opposed to writing only for myself), I thought I should assemble a "best of" single link to my posts and create something of a short course on the information transfer model/framework and its application to the quantity theory of money. One point to make at the beginning is that the information transfer model is a framework for doing things supply-and-demand-y (i.e. making economic arguments). You need to include other things in order to describe the real world. In this case I describe a quantity theory of money in the information transfer framework and find that it does a little better that the real than the traditional quantity theory which seems to work only for high inflation countries. The theory presented works for low inflation countries as well as high. Anyway, here are the posts you should read (other posts are speculative musings and numerical games):
Basics of the Information Transfer Model (ITM)
Fundamental description of the information transfer model
http:// informationtransfereconomics. blogspot.com/2013/04/the- information-transfer-model. html
Deriving "supply and demand" from the information transfer model http://
http://
Aggregate Demand/Aggregate Supply
I don't have a good post on using the ITM as an AD/AS model ... perhaps I should write one. But all it would say is if you took
$$
Q^s = AS \text{ and } Q^d = AD \text{ and } P = P
$$
then you get what you'd expect. It doesn't have vertical $\text{LRAS}$ curves (with perfect information transfer), but it gets the basic ideas across. Having the information transfer index $\kappa$ become a function of $\text{AD}$ and $\text{AS}$ brings you to what I think is the best use of the ITM so far ...
Information Transfer Model and the Quantity Theory of Money
This series of posts catalogs some numerical work where we take $Q^s = AS = MB$ and $Q^d = AD = NGDP$ and culminates in deriving the quantity theory of money from information transfer. The equations do an excellent job of calculating inflation from NGDP and the monetary base in the US from 1960 to the onset of the financial crisis in 2008. The derivation of the traditional quantity theory of money (which only works well for high inflation countries) using the information transfer model framework not only recovers the traditional quantity theory but extends the application it to low inflation countries.
http://
Empirical results with the Information Transfer Quantity Theory
This final series shows a better way to visualize the information transfer model (the equation determining the price level is best envisioned as describing a surface on which the $MB$ and $NGDP$ perform a random walk with drift). The results do a good job of describing the US, Japan and Germany. I also venture an inflation prediction with the model (the price level will stay flat -- low inflation -- until 2020) even with monetary moves comparable to the QE already conducted by the Fed.
http://http://
http://
Predicting inflation
Here is an example of trying to predict inflation using the information transfer model (with the quantity theory of money). We posit a region of points near the last data point on the information transfer model surface. If we assume NGDP stays on trend (linear extrapolation of the log trend), that gives a reasonable estimate of the maximum radius of the region. Even if the monetary base stayed constant NGDP would only grow at best on trend. You could get more complicated by using an ellipse with a different radius for the monetary bound if you like. We'll just use a circle here. In this graph the points (blue) are shown near the last data point on the curve (also blue) -- they represent possible position states on the surface after some given amount of time (I extrapolated to 2020):
If we use these data points to show the price level, we obtain a prediction (assuming linear drift from the original point) which is essentially the vertical axis in the 3D surface plotted versus time:
We'll see if this comes true over the next seven years ...
Interestingly, the model says that we are near the top of a ridge so the surface is relatively flat, meaning little increase or decrease in the price level, i.e. a Japanese-style lost decade. In this model, it has little to do with a "liquidity trap", unless you define "liquidity trap" as being near the ridge of the surface. The reason is that we are near the ridge is that we are near where $Q^s \sim \exp \sqrt{\log Q^d}$: the monetary base are belong to us is too large relative to NGDP. Either NGDP growth or reductions in the growth rate monetary base relative to NGDP will move use away from the ridge.
Does this count as a policy prescription?
Long run quantity theory information transfer surfaces
Following this post, I tried to look at some longer run data. In this case I used GNP (and GNP deflator, but still the Adjusted Monetary Base) from FRED for 1929 to the present and plotted two surfaces. One surface (white, blue curve) uses $\kappa \sim \log \text{MB}/\log \text{GNP}$, the second surface (red) uses a constant value of $\kappa = 0.65$. The result for the price level fit does well with varying $\kappa$ (blue line) post WWII, while the constant $\kappa$ (red dashed line) does worse post WWII, but much better with the earlier data (data is the green line)
Here are the surface plots:
The red surface for constant $\kappa = 0.65$ follows the green line on average, while the blue curve (model, white surface) really messes up on the pre-WWII data. Why? I am not sure. The gold standard? Bad data?
Tuesday, July 9, 2013
More global perspective
I'd take these results with a grain of salt since the FRED data for M1, NGDP and the deflator for Germany (1971-1998) is a mishmash of Deutch marks, Euros (converted back to marks) and unification. Additionally, the data points form a line so the intersection with the surface is somewhat ambiguous. But as with the previous post (the model is in blue and empirical data is in green, with the model defining the 2D surface), it is not that bad of a description:
Monday, July 8, 2013
A more global perspective
I realize that focusing on US data is pretty parochial. So here are the results following the previous post but for Japan. Instead of the St. Louis Adjusted Monetary Base, I used M1 for Japan from FRED (and the GDP deflator instead of the CPI). The information transfer model still works pretty well:
Sunday, July 7, 2013
Another perspective on the information transfer model
Taking
$$ Q^d = \text{NGDP}(t) $$
And
$$ Q^s = \text{MB}(t) $$
As in the previous few posts, and using the equations
$$
P = \frac{1}{\kappa} \left( \frac{Q^d_\text{ref}}{Q^s_\text{ref}} \right) \left( \frac{Q^s}{Q^s_\text{ref}} \right)^{1/\kappa-1}
$$
And
$$ \frac{1}{\kappa} = \frac{\log Q^d}{\log Q^s} $$
$$ Q^d = \text{NGDP}(t) $$
And
$$ Q^s = \text{MB}(t) $$
As in the previous few posts, and using the equations
$$
P = \frac{1}{\kappa} \left( \frac{Q^d_\text{ref}}{Q^s_\text{ref}} \right) \left( \frac{Q^s}{Q^s_\text{ref}} \right)^{1/\kappa-1}
$$
And
$$ \frac{1}{\kappa} = \frac{\log Q^d}{\log Q^s} $$
I graphed the empirical data from FRED (in green, with the identification $P = \text{CPI}$) and the model fit (blue) along with the the previous equations as a function of $Q^s = \text{MB}$ and $Q^d = \text{NGDP}$ (the 2D surface). One can imagine the blue line as the best fit to the green curve constrained to the surface. Time goes along the curves from 1960 to 2013. The dashed gray line is the local maximum of the surface in the $Q^s$ dimension for a fixed $Q^d$ (i.e. it follows the ridgeline). I show two different perspectives on the surface (the flat region is simply the edge of the graphed region and not significant):
In the following pair, I've zoomed in on the time series from 1990 to 2013
I am going to leave my musings in the comment section, if I end up having anything novel to say.
Tuesday, July 2, 2013
Low inflation and high information transfer indices
A quick addition to the previous results. If we look at the bi-weekly St Louis Adjusted Monetary Base (seasonally adjusted) data, and measure the slope over the previous 20-weeks for each date, we find that the average slope (monetary base growth rate) was about $6.5\%$ (before 2008). If the information transfer index is (as determined in the previous results) $1/\kappa \approx 1.31$, then $i = 0.065 \times (1.31 - 1) \approx 2.0 \%$. This is the de facto inflation target over the past few decades.
A low $1/\kappa$ (i.e. high $\kappa$) is a way of obtaining a lower inflation rate for any given monetary base growth rate. Additionally, $\kappa$ is slow to react to changes in MB and NGDP growth rates (since it depends on the rates only in the long run as $t \rightarrow \infty$; it depends on the absolute magnitude in the short run), but $i$ can change immediately to changes in $r_0$. The growth rate of the price level will follow the change in $r_0$ in the short run. However, while increasing $r_0$ will cause $i$ to increase in the short run, it can cause $i$ to decrease in the long run as $1/\kappa$ decreases.
The trend has been towards $1/\kappa$ decreasing since the 1970s in the US, which leads to a disinflationary trend. This trend may well be due to the long run effect on $1/\kappa$ from an increased MB growth rate $r_0$, which went from $\sim 2-3\%$ in the 1960s to $\sim 6.5\%$ since the 1970s until the 2000s.
Recovering the quantity theory from information transfer
In this post, I see where the information transfer model of the quantity theory of money (ITM + QTM) reduces to the traditional QTM. I will take $ P = P_0 e^{i t}$, $ Q^{d} = Q^{d}_{ref} e^{r t}$, and $ Q^{s} = Q^{s}_{ref} e^{r_0 t}$ where $i$ is the growth rate of the price level (inflation), $r$ is the NGDP growth rate and $r_0$ is the growth rate of the monetary base.
Using the equations here, we obtain
$$
i t + \log P_0 = \log \frac{1}{\kappa} + \left(\frac{1}{\kappa} - 1\right) (r_0 t + \log Q^{s}_{ref}) + \log \frac{Q^{d}_{ref}}{Q^{s}_{ref}}
$$With
$$ \kappa = \frac{r_0 t + \log Q^{s}_{ref}}{r t + \log Q^{d}_{ref}} $$
Taking the limit as $t \rightarrow \infty$ (the long run) one can show that the leading terms are
$$
i t \sim \left( \frac{1}{\kappa} - 1 \right) r_0 t = (r - r_0) t\\
$$With
$$ \kappa \sim \frac{r_0}{r} $$
For $\kappa = 1/2$, the rate of the price level increase is $ i \approx r_0$, which is the main result of the traditional quantity theory of money. I would like to point out here that the quantity theory of money in the information transfer framework does not require $\kappa = 1/2$, hence the ITF + QTM can describe the observed deviation for low inflation economies.
More interestingly, if we look at the ratio of NGDP growth rate to the growth rate of the price level $r/i$, with $r = i + R$ where $R$ is the real growth rate for large $i$, we find that
$$
\frac{\frac{1}{\kappa} r_0}{\left( \frac{1}{\kappa} - 1 \right) r_0} = \frac{i + R}{i} \sim \frac{i}{i} \sim 1
$$So
$$ \frac{\frac{1}{\kappa} }{\frac{1}{\kappa} - 1 } \sim 1 $$
such that $\kappa = 1/2$ for economies with high growth in the price level -- and since $\kappa = 1/2 $, we find that $i \approx r_0$ and recover the traditional quantity theory of money.
The ITM + QTM approach has an additional result that says that for countries well-approximated by the traditional quantity theory of money, $r \approx 2 r_0$, or $r/r_0 \approx 2$, which is roughly true for the US since the depression (data are from FRED, I used GNP for years before the 1950s, and by $\Delta_y$ I mean the continuously compounded annual rate of change):
The gray line is $r/r_0 = 2$, the average of $r/r_0 = 1.87$ is shown as the red line and the dashed red line is the post-1980 average $r/r_0 = 1.31$. This lower value explains the deviation from the diagonal line (the traditional QTM) in the graphs in this post. It is not that countries with lower inflation rates don't obey the QTM. Countries with lower inflation rates apparently tend to have monetary policies that are too tight for a traditional QTM, but they can be described by a ITM + QTM theory with larger $\kappa$. From the ratios above, the average $\kappa = 0.53$ over the entire period shown, but the post-1980 average has been $\kappa = 0.76$. Why this happens is not determined by the model, which only says that if $r/r_0 \approx 2$, then the traditional QTM is a good theory and that for high inflation rates, $r/r_0 \rightarrow 2$ so the traditional QTM works for countries with high growth in the price level. (But the traditional QTM does not necessarily follow for countries with high monetary base growth rates! Large $i \implies$ QTM, but large $r_0$ requires other knowledge about the economy like $r$ in order to see if $i$ is large and the QTM applies, or $\kappa \sim r_0/r \approx 1/2$ and the QTM applies.)
Note also that even the (shown) seasonally adjusted ratio is highly volatile -- likely illustrating one of the reasons the Fed doesn't target e.g. M2. It is also ironic that the point when Milton Friedman's ideas supposedly were at their peak was the point when the US started deviating more from the traditional quantity theory of money.
Saturday, June 29, 2013
Is there structure to the behavior of monetary base growth rates?
One side note from the model described in the previous post (where I assumed NGDP = monetary base growth rate + 5%, a quantity theory of money in the information transfer framework) ...
Here is a plot of the information transfer index vs annual monetary base growth rate and time (in years):
There seems to be a change in the structure of the "ideal economy" (NGDP ~ exp{(r+0.05)*t} and MB ~ exp{r*t}) at an monetary base growth rate of around r = 7% where the information transfer index starts growing (as opposed to shrinking) over time. Here are three cross sections through the previous graph at an monetary base growth rate of r = 2%, 7% and 50%:
Where this separation occurs depends on the relative normalization of the monetary base and NGDP, but it is an interesting result. High inflation economies approach an information transfer index of 1 in the long run while low inflation economies have a steady decline in the information transfer index. Note that an information transfer index of 1 is the ideal: the size of the quantity supplied (or the number of supply symbols) is equal to the demand (or the number of demand symbols).
Note that the inflation rate does not have such a separation:
(I apologize for Mathematica's placement of the contour labels.)
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