New fair-value cost estimates from the CBO

Though it won't say so explicitly, the CBO has been on a long quest to convince Congress to change its accounting procedures. It's out with another study showing the budgetary cost of credit programs under current-law accounting (FCRA) versus a more comprehensive method known as fair-value accounting (FVA). As usual, credit programs that show a profit under FCRA actually show a cost under FVA.

The analysis of the Export-Import Bank is particularly interesting, since the agency has come under increasing fire for being, in President Obama's words, "little more than a fund for corporate welfare." Ex-Im supporters had cited the "profit" the bank earns for the government as a justification for its existence. No longer.

To read all about FVA, please see my previous post.

Roundup of student loan commentary

The New America Foundation's Jason Delisle and I are hard at work on a 5,000-word piece that discusses fair-value accounting (FVA) and how it applies to issues such as student loans, public pensions, and private retirement accounts. In the meantime, here is a selection of my previous work on student loans and FVA.

"The Unknown Cost of Student Loans" is the foundational document that describes what FVA is and how it changes the cost estimates of student loans and other credit programs. It contains a numerical example of how budgeting works under the current system versus FVA. Though consumed with immigration work last April, I put this report together after-hours, getting it out just in time for the student loan debate in Congress.

"How Government Uses Accounting Tricks to Hide the Student Loan Swindle" is the companion op-ed that I had published in Forbes while the Congressional debate was ongoing. It's a less quantitative explanation of FVA, with application to both student loans and public pensions.

"The Student-Loan Deal: A Mixed Bag" describes how the debate was resolved in Congress. I reiterate my opposition to any federal involvement in student loans but note that the legislation at least pegs the subsidy to market interest rates.

"Attention, Elizabeth Warren: Students Are Already Free to Refinance Their College Loans" debunks the popular talking point that allowing students to refinance their college loans with the government is a matter of leveling the playing field. In fact, students are as free to refinance with a private lender as homeowners and businesses are. The trouble is that students are already getting a great deal on their loans due to government subsidies, and no private lender wants to take full responsibility for unprofitable loans.

"What ‘Profits’? Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi Misunderstands Student Loans" and "Sorry Slate, There’s Still No Such Thing as Federal Student-Loan Profits" criticize articles in the popular press for being entirely premised on the idea that student loans earn a profit for the government, even though FVA indicates they come at a cost.

New AEI paper grades all 50 states on public-sector compensation

Public-sector compensation has been politically salient in some states but a non-issue in others. States such as New York, California, and Ohio always seem to be discussing pension shortfalls, "windfall" retirements, excessive job security, etc. But where are these issues in Kansas? Or Virginia?

As Andrew Biggs and I show in a new American Enterprise Institute working paper, there is tremendous variation in the generosity of public-sector compensation (wages plus benefits) across states. Some states offer a large premium to public employees relative to what they would earn in the private sector, while other states appear to pay less than market levels. And, not surprisingly, the political salience of public-sector pay is positively correlated with its generosity.

The following table ranks each state from least generous (relative to private-sector pay in that state) to most generous. Because we shouldn't make too much of small differences between states, the states are sorted into five broad categories:

Table 2. Total Compensation Categories
Category label	Range	States
“Modest penalty”	-6% or less	Virginia
“Market level”	-5% to +5%	Kansas, Indiana, Minnesota, Georgia, West Virginia, Mississippi, South Dakota, North Carolina, Vermont, Colorado, Washington, South Carolina, Kentucky, Idaho, Arizona, Nebraska, Tennessee, Utah
“Modest premium”	+6% to +10%	Alaska, Missouri, Florida, Arkansas, Texas, Oklahoma, Maryland, Iowa, Montana, North Dakota, New Hampshire, Delaware
“Large premium”	+11% to +20%	Alabama, Louisiana, Wisconsin, Oregon, Ohio, Hawaii, Massachusetts, Nevada, Maine, New Mexico, Michigan
“Very large premium”	+20%	New Jersey, California, Rhode Island, Illinois, New York, Pennsylvania, Connecticut
Source: Authors’ calculations

Clearly, studies that evaluate public-sector pay by lumping all state workers together are not helpful for policymakers. The goal of our new paper is to help each state individually decide whether it needs to consider pay reform.

All of the main take-aways come in the first 15 pages of the paper. For those interested in delving deeper--much deeper--we've included a lengthy methodological appendix. The appendix is probably the most comprehensive discussion of technical and corollary issues ever put together on this topic. Want to know more about taking logs in a wage regression? Controlling for firm size? Breaking down the premium by education level? Accounting for salary growth in pension valuation? Adjusting the discount rate on deferred compensation to include market risk? Valuing job security? Considering other job amenities?

It's all there, contained within 87 pages, 14 figures, 5 tables, and 120 end notes. The paper is meant to be as much a resource for academic students of the issue as it is for state policymakers.

The myth of time diversification

Investments become safer the longer you hold them, right? If you think so, your reasoning probably goes something like this: The stock market is cyclical--sometimes it's up, sometimes it's down--but it has a generally upward trajectory. So year-to-year deviations from the average (or "expected") return are likely to cancel out, and you'll end up with the expected return in the long run. In other words, the risk of under-performing expectations over a long period of time approaches zero.

You've fallen for the time diversification fallacy. It's generated by a confused focus on the average yearly rate of return as opposed to what really counts--the cumulative return. Put simply, the risk of a sub-par average yearly return goes down over time, but the effect of such a low return--should it occur--is far more harmful to a portfolio when it occurs over a long period compared to a short period. Therefore, the risk of a large cumulative loss actually goes up the longer an investment is held.

For a numerical example of what I mean, please read the third fallacy discussed in my paper, "Nine Fallacies Used to Defend Public-Sector Pensions."

Or consider what finance professor Zvi Bodie noted about long-term put options. A "put" is basically an insurance policy that an investor can buy. Say you invest $100 in a risky asset that you expect to grow by 10 percent each year. You can purchase a put option that guarantees you the right to sell the asset in one year for the $110 that you're hoping for.

Like all insurance, put options cost money. Bodie noted that if time diversification is valid, then the cost of put options should go down as the time horizon becomes longer. Take your $100 investment. Since its expected annual rate of return is 10 percent, then you should have $110 after the first year and $259 after 10 years. If investments get safer over time, it should cost less to guarantee the $259 after 10 years than to guarantee the $110 after one year.

It doesn't. Bodie pointed out that option pricing models (including the standard Black-Scholes model) show put options becoming more expensive as the applicable time period increases.

Source: Zvi Bodie, "On the Risk of Stocks in the Long Run"

Why does all this matter? Well, it suggests some important investment advice: If you consider an investment too risky over one year, don't invest in it for the long-term either! In a public policy context, the time diversification fallacy is the basis for claims that public pensions need not worry about long-run risk. (They actually should.) It also shows up in the case for "collective" defined-contribution retirement plans. I wrote about collective plans recently for the Agenda.

In search of preschool critics

In my inaugural post for The Agenda, National Review's domestic policy blog, I praised Russ Whitehurst's technically sophisticated review of preschool studies. If only there were more examples of such skepticism about preschool! I discussed how a false "consensus" can develop around such issues:

When academics cloister themselves within a specialty or sub-specialty that interests them, “groupthink” sometimes emerges. In the case of preschool, the field attracts those who are inclined to support some form of early education, while those who are skeptical tend to focus on other topics. The result is a false consensus that only Whitehurst and a handful of others have been working to dispel.

As if to prove my point about the lack of dedicated preschool skeptics, education reporter Lillian Mongeau tweeted this reaction to my piece:

@alexanderrusso Wish @nro had mentioned someone other than Whitehurst. My editor is getting sick of the same #preschool critic every time.
— Lillian Mongeau (@lrmongeau) March 7, 2014

I don't want to overstate the problem. There are preschool critics other than Whitehurst who have written some great pieces, and reporters need to broaden their search for different perspectives. Nevertheless, self-selection into the early education field tends to leave the skeptics outnumbered.

The Senate immigration bill is not dead

My facebook/google profile picture is a screen capture from a Fox News interview I did on the Senate immigration bill, from May 7th of last year. I thought I'd share it to warn people that immigration is still a live issue, as the House ponders whether to pass a similar "reform."

The video takes about ten seconds to load, and it contains an annoying commercial from Fox that I can't get rid of. So please be patient.

 

If the embedded video isn't working, you can watch it here.

Against "consensus" science

I often cringe when I hear the media use the word consensus in reference to some area of science. The concept of consensus is antithetical to the scientific method. I have no problem talking about "mainstream" or "conventional" science, or saying that "most scholars accept" some claim. But "consensus" is not right.

Much like the equally bad phrase "settled science," consensus implies that the debate is entirely over. That indisputable proof exists. That anyone who disagrees is simply wrong as a matter of objective fact. Worst of all, it implies that truth can be determined by a majority vote.

Who believes in gravity?

In science, nothing is ever final. Everything is constantly subject to re-evaluation and re-testing. In fact, if a statement is not falsifiable, then it's not considered a scientific claim in the first place. And it takes only one person--not a majority--to overturn an existing finding.

"But wait a minute, Jason," every reader is surely now saying. "Didn't you use the term consensus to describe the foundations of IQ research?" Guilty as charged, but that was actually a calculated appeal to the journalists who formed my target audience. The reference is in "Why can't we talk about IQ?" published by Politico. (Of all my responses to the dissertation controversy from eight months ago, that's the one I am most proud of.) To show that the media had denounced scientific findings about which there is little technical dispute, I wrote:

What scholars of mental ability know, but have never successfully gotten the media to understand, is that a scientific consensus, based on an extensive and consistent literature, has long been reached on many of the questions that still seem controversial to journalists. [emphasis added]

I went back and forth on whether to use the word consensus to describe that set of views shared by nearly all cognitive psychologists. In the end I went with it, because the word carries a certain resonance with my intended audience. It was an appeal to those on the Left who are accustomed to hearing consensus thrown around in the context of global warming, second-hand smoke, same-sex parenting, and so on.

I wanted Politico readers to consider that they might be just as wrong about IQ as they believe their opponents are about those other issues. So I deliberately used "consensus" rather than "mainstream" or "rarely disputed."

Anyway, this whole post was motivated by the alleged consensus on government preschool, which I discussed in National Review recently.