The Value of Connections to Dick Cheney

David Fisman, Ray Fisman, Julia Galef, and Rakesh Khurana have a fascinating (I know I overuse this word but it’s really deserved here) working paper that tries to estimate the value to a company of a connection to Vice President Dick Cheney. They look at the market reaction (i.e. stock price) of companies connected to Cheney to Cheney’s heart attacks, his selection as Vice President, the likelihood war in Iraq at certain points in time, and the probability of a Bush victory in 2000 to see if these events cause the companies to significantly over- or underperform their respective sectors. They find that the value of such ties is zero.They think that this is to some degree generally applicable to individual politicians in the US:

While prior evidence suggests that business-government relations are an important part of U.S. commerce, our results suggest that these connections are more institutional than personal. That is, there are well-organized institutions (such as political action committees and other lobbying entities) for facilitating these relations that differ from the deeply personalized favor exchange that characterize business-politics relations in so much of the world.

I think that this result needs much further study but the implication that the value to a company of a personal connection to a politician is relatively unimportant compared to more formal and broad lobbying and PACs is going to be hugely important in figuring how to best fight corruption and the influence of special interests.

Update: Here’s another similar paper Estimating the Value of Political Connections by Ray Fisman on how news about former Indonesian President Suharto’s impacted companies with connections to him. I remember reading this about two years ago but don’t remember for which class…

Iceland’s Crisis

As most people have heard at this point, Iceland has been one of the hardest hit in the current financial crisis. Björk summarizes the situation best in this very thoughtful article in the London Times:

Gigantic loans, it has been revealed, were taken out abroad by a few individuals and without the full knowledge of the Icelandic people. Now the nation seems to be responsible for having to pay them back.

This weekend I wanted to learn a bit more about what the situation in Iceland is like and found an Icelandic blog Iceland Weather Report linked from A Fistful of Euros that has been giving regular updates on the situation on the ground:

[T]here were massive layoffs here at the end of last month. Most of those were in the construction industry – manual workers, designers, architects … anyone in the business of constructing new buildings. Many were foreign citizens who had been living and working here temporarily in construction. The second-largest hard-hit industry was, obviously, the financial services sector – bank workers being laid off. The third-largest was retail. In addition, many people have been laid off and then re-hired on different terms, which usually has meant that they’ve had to take a pay cut.

Basically, things here have slowed down drastically. Public and private spending has been cut back wherever possible. Pretty much anything that can be postponed, has been postponed. That goes for companies and institutions [public and private], as well as individuals. People aren’t going out to buy new cars or even new clothes these days, nobody is remodelling their house or doing anything of the sort that isn’t absolutely crucial. A state of affairs that I suspect isn’t unique to Iceland – this is what happens across the board in a recession.

What IS unique to Iceland – and very troubling – is the state of our currency.

The New York Times had an article on the impact as well, much of it focusing on the implications of Kronur’s rapid fall in value on the economy. The starkness of it all didn’t really hit me until I read that a third of Icelanders are considering leaving though:

Her fixed costs are no longer fixed. Five years ago, the company built a new factory, borrowing the 120 million kronur — about $1.5 million — in foreign currencies. But the currency’s fall has increased her debt to 200 million kronur. This summer, her monthly payments were 2.5 million kronur; now they may be double that — the equivalent of $38,500 in Iceland’s debased currency.
“My financial manager is talking to the banks every day, and we don’t know how much we’re supposed to pay,” Ms. Hedinsdottir said.
In a recent survey, one-third of Icelanders said they would consider emigrating. Foreigners are already abandoning Iceland.

So how did this happen? Tom Friedman explains the basics:

The Icelandic banks, while not invested in U.S. subprime mortgages, had gone on their own borrowing and lending binges, wooing savers from across Europe with 5.45 percent interest savings accounts [Note: Interest rates were around 15% because of high inflation].

In a flat world, money can easily seek out the highest returns, and when word got around about Iceland, deposits poured in from Britain — some $1.8 billion. Unfortunately, though, when global credit markets closed up, and the krona fell, “the Icelandic banks were unable to finance their debts, many of which were denominated in foreign currencies.”

The current situation is dire and its enormity is somewhat difficult to comprehend, Iceland is a small country and according to Iceland Weather Report the claims that Britan is making on Landsbanki , “are 3-4 times higher than the war compensation claims Germany was made to pay after World War II.” Recovering from a shock like this is going to be a difficult, long, and painful process. And yet I want to end this post on a somewhat positive note. While the effects of this crisis are truly terrible and none of what happened can be excused it is also an opportunity to reevaluate and to change direction. Icelanders are a proud, dynamic, and well-educated people and have recovered from worse, or (once more) in the words of Iceland Weather Report:

Cultivating what really matters. A return to basic values. That’s the prevailing emphasis around here these days and yes, it is a Very Good Thing. A few short weeks ago the media was still glorifying our “Tycoons” and doing features on people who decorated their massive concrete homes with cold fixtures and soulless minimalist furniture. What we get now is stories of people sticking together, helping each other [...]

Education authorities are making sure children have a secure place in the preschools even if their parents default on payments. A crisis committee is being set up to help people who have lost their jobs. Mortgages are all being taken over by the state’s Housing Financing Fund and those who can’t make mortgage payments can apply to have them halted for the time being. [..]

We have good, solid resources: fish in the sea, heat in the ground, copious amounts of energy, a beautiful country with myriad opportunities in tourism, and an excellent workforce: a nation of well-educated and hard working people, many of whom are now out of work and who can use their expertise to help rebuild our economy and much of the infrastructure. After all, this is not the worst that we have endured: on two or three occasions in the past the Icelandic nation has been close to being wiped out by calamities much worse than this, such as volcanic eruptions and the bubonic plague.

Extreme Signs of Global Economic Readjustment

The volatility in Oil, Food, Metal, and Transportation Prices is astounding these days, this paragraph in a Washington Post article really hit that point home:

China has also trimmed the importation of other materials that have fueled its spectacular run of growth. [Charles Bradford, metals analyst at Soleil Securities] noted that ocean freight rates for iron ore from Brazil to China are down to $12 per ton today from about $108 last May.

The Financial Crisis and Human Capital Allocation

Here’s an excellent article by Fareed Zakaria on why the financial crisis also presents a huge opportunity to clean up some of the problems of the political, financial, and economic system of the last decade(s) and how the new administration has (available) the brain power to effect this change:

Volcker has also argued that the highly complex financial system was not nearly as stable as people believed and that far-reaching efforts were needed to regulate and stabilize it. Now these issues will get attention at the highest level. The fear on Wall Street is that a Democratic administration would overregulate. But look at who is advising Barack Obama—Buffett, Volcker, former Treasury secretaries Robert Rubin and Larry Summers. It is more likely that what will come from their efforts will be a better-regulated financial system that, while producing less-extravagant profits, will be more stable and secure.

What I personally find really interesting is his succinct summary of something I have heard over and over in the last few weeks – How the inflated financial industry caused a misallocation of talent into the financial sector:

The financial industry itself is likely to shrink, and that’s not a bad thing, either. It has ballooned dramatically in size. Curry points out that “30 percent of S&P 500 profits last year were earned by financial firms, and U.S. consumers were spending $800 billion more than they earned every year. As a result, most of our top math Ph.D.s were being pulled into nonproductive financial engineering instead of biotech research and fuel technology. Capital expenditures went into retail construction instead of critical infrastructure.” The crisis will stop the misallocation of human and financial resources and redirect them in more-productive ways. If some of the smart people now on Wall Street end up building better models of energy usage and efficiency, that would be a net gain for the economy.

Esther Duflo recently wrote about this for VoxEU and two years ago I read an excellent paper on the incentives for productive and unproductive economic behavior by William Baumol that I cannot recommend strongly enough:

[The] allocation between productive activities such as innovation and largely unproductive activities such as rent seeking and organized crime. This allocation is heavily influenced by the relative payoffs society offers to such activities. This implies that policy can influence the allocation of entrepreneurship more effectively than it can influence its supply.

More on the Rising Dollar

I recently posted on how increasingly broad deposit insurance might be one reason for the rising dollar and wanted to post some more on this after seeing the following referenced by Tom Barnett from an Economist article I read a while ago (Btw, the Barnett article is really interesting if you’re following the whole ‘Post American Century’ debate):

[Kristin Forbes] found that a lack of financial development at home makes foreigners keener to invest in America. What attracts them is the size, liquidity, efficiency and transparency of its financial markets compared with what is on offer in their domestic markets. This finding adds weight to theories which explain global imbalances as a consequence of slow financial progress. In this view, poor countries save hard and buy foreign securities because of a dearth of good options at home.