Labor Costs, Inflation Expectations, and the Affordable Care Act: What Businesses Are Telling Us

The Atlanta Fed’s May survey of businesses showed little overall concern about near-term inflation. Year-ahead unit cost expectations averaged 2 percent, down a tenth from April and on par with business inflation expectations at this time last year.

OK, we’re going to guess this observation doesn’t exactly knock you off your chair. But here’s something we’ve been keeping an eye on that you might find interesting. When we ask firms about what role, if any, labor costs are likely to play in their prices over the next 12 months, an increasing proportion have been telling us they see a potential for upward price pressure coming from labor costs (see the chart).

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To investigate further, we posed a special question to our Business Inflation Expectations (BIE) panel regarding their expectations for compensation growth over the next 12 months: “Projecting ahead over the next 12 months, by roughly what percentage do you expect your firm’s average compensation per worker (including benefits) to change?”

We got a pretty large range of responses, but on average, firms told us they expect average compensation growth—including benefits—of 2.8 percent. That’s about a percent higher than the average over the past year (as estimated by either the index of compensation per hour or the employment cost index). But a 2.8 percent rise is also about a percentage point below average compensation growth before the recession. We’re included to read the survey as a confirmation that labor markets are improving and expected to improve further over the coming year. But we’re not inclined to interpret the survey data as an indication that the labor market is nearing full employment.

We’ve also been hearing more lately about the potential for the Affordable Care Act (ACA) to have a significant influence on labor costs and, presumably, to provide some upward price pressure. Indeed, several of our panelists commented on their concern about the influence of the ACA when they completed their May BIE survey. So can we tie any of this expected compensation growth to the ACA, a significant share of which is scheduled to go into effect eight months from now?

Because a disproportionate impact from the ACA will fall on firms that employ 50 or more workers, we separated our panel into firms with 50 or more employees, and those employing fewer than 50 workers. What we see is that average expected compensation growth is the same for the bigger employers and smaller employers. Moreover, the big firms in our sample report the same inflation expectation as the smaller firms.

But the data reveal that the bigger firms are a little more uncertain about their unit cost projections for the year ahead. OK, it’s not a big difference, but it is statistically significant. So while their cost and compensation expectations are not yet being affected by the prospect of the ACA, the act might be influencing their uncertainty about those potential costs.

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By Mike Bryan, vice president and senior economist,

Brent Meyer, economist, and

Nicholas Parker, senior economic research analyst, all in the Atlanta Fed’s research department

Weighing In on the Recent Discrepancy in the Inflation Statistics

Recently, there has been a divergence between inflation as measured by the Consumer Price Index (CPI) and the preferred inflation measure of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), which is the price index for personal consumption expenditures (PCE). That divergence is fairly evident in the “core” measures of these two price statistics shown in the chart below.

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This strikes us (and others, like Reuters’ Pedro da Costa) as a pretty significant development. The core CPI is telling us that the underlying inflation trend is still holding reasonably close to the FOMC’s longer-term target of 2 percent. But the behavior of the core PCE is rather reminiscent of 2010, when the inflation statistics slid to uncomfortably low levels—a contributing factor to the FOMC’s adoption of QE2. Which of these inflation statistics are we to believe?

Part of the divergence between the two inflation measures is due to rents. Rents are rising at a good pace right now, and since it’s pretty clear that the CPI over-weights their influence, we might be inclined to dismiss some part of the CPI’s more elevated signal. But then there are all those “non-market” components that have been pulling the PCE inflation measure lower—and these aren’t in the CPI. These are components of the PCE price index for which there are no clearly observable transaction prices. They include the “cost” of services provided to households by nonprofit organizations, or the benefits households receive that can only be imputed (i.e., that “free” checking account your bank provides if you maintain a high balance.) Since we can’t really observe the price of these things, we’d probably be inclined to dismiss their influence on PCE the inflation measure. But we’ve done the math, and the impact of these two influences accounts for only about a third of the recent gap between the core PCE and the core CPI inflation measures. Most of the disagreement between the two inflation estimates is coming from elsewhere.

We could continue to parse, item by item, all the various components and weights of the two statistics to get to the bottom of this discrepancy. But in the end, such an accounting exercise would merely tell us why the gap between the two measures has emerged, not which measure is giving the best signal of emerging inflation trends.

As an alternative approach, we thought we’d let the data speak for themselves and search for a common trend that runs through the detailed price data. What we have in mind is to compute the “first principal component” of the disaggregated data used to calculate the CPI and the PCE price indexes. The first principal component is a weighting of the data that explains as much of the data variation as possible. So, in effect, the detailed price data in each price index are being reweighted in a way that reveals their most commonly shared trend, and not by their share of consumer expenditure.

The chart below shows the 12-month trend of the first principal component derived from the 45 CPI components used in the computation of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland’s median CPI, and the first principal component derived from the 177 components used in the computation of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas’s trimmed-mean PCE. (These are the most detailed component price data we could easily get our hands on.)

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So what do we make of this picture? Well, three things:

First, inflation as measured by the PCE price index has tended to track about 0.25 percentage point under inflation as measured by the CPI over time. So part of the gap between the two inflation measures appears to be a long-term feature of the two inflation statistics.

Second, the first principal components of both the CPI and the PCE data have been persistently under their precrisis averages. In the case of the PCE measure, the first principal component is under the FOMC’s 2 percent target (a point that has not gone unnoticed by Paul Krugman).

A third takeaway from the chart is that the “disinflation” pattern traced out by these principal components has been gradual and modest—much more so than what the core PCE has recently indicated and what the data were telling us back in 2010.

Does that mean we should ignore the recent disinflation being exhibited in the core PCE inflation measure? Well, let’s put it this way: If you’re a glass-half-full sort, we’d say that the recent disinflation trend exhibited by the PCE price index doesn’t seem to be “woven” into the detailed price data, and it certainly doesn’t look like what we saw in 2010. But to you glass-half-empty types, we’d also point out that getting the inflation trend up to 2 percent is proving to be a curiously difficult task.

By Mike Bryan, vice president and senior economist,

Pat Higgins, economist,

Brent Meyer, economist, and

Nicholas Parker, senior economic research analyst, all in the Atlanta Fed’s research department

Do falling commodity prices imply disinflation ahead?

Cost pressures at the manufacturing level appear to be easing—at least, so say the manufacturers in our Business Inflation Expectations survey. In June, manufacturers reported that unit costs were up only 1.3 percent over the last 12 months, a full percentage point below their assessment at the end of last year. Retailers, on the other hand, report unit cost increases of 2.1 percent, down a bit from May, but 0.3 percentage points higher than in December.

We put a special question to our panel in June that may shed a little light on these patterns. When we asked firms to tell us what has been driving their unit costs over the past 12 months, manufacturers saw considerably less pressure coming from their cost of materials compared with other firms. Perhaps this discovery isn't very surprising. After all, commodity prices have been falling pretty sharply of late, and these costs are especially influential to manufacturers' assessment of the cost environment. (Indeed, in response to a special question we asked our panel in March, manufacturers ranked materials costs as the number-one influence on their pricing decisions.)

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Does the fall in commodity prices mean we can expect a pass-through of these lower costs to consumers?

Perhaps. There's certainly a strong intuitive appeal to the "pipeline" theory of inflation. Here's the idea as described by the Bank of England (BOE):

"Consumer prices…can be thought of as the end of a 'pipeline' of costs and prices. The final price will be made up of many different components of cost as well as the retailer's profit or margin… Prices at one stage of the pipeline become costs for the next stage…"

But economists who have looked down the inflation pipeline haven't found flows, but rather trickles. Years ago, Todd Clark of the Cleveland Fed put it this way while he was at the Kansas City Fed: "the empirical evidence… shows the production chain only weakly links consumer prices to producer prices."

So the "inflation pipeline" theory isn't that simple, as the BOE goes on to explain:

"The [pipeline] idea is a simplification… Prices are determined by the interaction of supply and demand. If the cost of raw materials rises, for example, producers or retailers might accept lower profit margins rather than raise their prices. They are more likely to do this if demand is weak or because of competition. The degree of competition in markets can affect how much cost increases are passed on to consumers."

Investigations into what might be obstructing the flows through the inflation pipeline have taken several approaches, including the one suggested by the BOE above: Firms may vary their markups (or margins) to damp the influence of costs on prices as they pass from one stage of production to the next. This idea has become a cause célèbre in macroeconomics and a key element of something called the New Keynesian Phillips Curve.

And so we've been keeping our eyes on how our panel assesses their margins, and we note something pretty striking. That is, margins are rising, but primarily for retailers. Indeed, as our panel sees it, retail margins are getting pretty close to returning to normal. Manufacturers, however, still see their margins as well below normal.

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Expanding margins, then, may slow the flow of falling commodity prices through the inflation pipeline. Manufacturers may take the fall in commodity prices as an opportunity to improve their woeful margins. And if they do pass these cost savings on down the production chain, it still might not hit consumers' wallets if retailers continue to increase their margins. (Based on our survey, that's what seems to have been going on lately, anyhow.)

For other insights from the June Business Inflation Expectation survey, see the Inflation Project on our website.

By Mike Bryan, vice president and senior economist,

Laurel Graefe, economic policy analysis specialist, and

Nicholas Parker, economic research analyst, all with the Atlanta Fed