Question 2: What is your evaluation of the following statement: “A well-designed government-stipulated wage increase can lead to higher productivity”?
Answer:
Strongly disagree
Confidence level:
Very confident
Comment:
“Well-designed” is doing a lot of heavy lifting in the statement. It’s uncertain whether any government-stipulated wage increase can lead to higher productivity, however well designed, and it’s certain that any attempt to exploit such a possibility will be badly designed. We simply do not understand enough about how a government-mandated wage increase affects productivity to start exploiting that relationship.
Question 1: Which of the following statements most closely reflects your understanding of the relationship between productivity and wages.
Answer:
Wage increases cannot increase productivity in and of themselves
Confidence level:
Very confident
Comment:
It is difficult to see a compelling causal mechanism running from higher aggregate wages to higher productivity in the UK, when the converse is so obviously attractive. There are clever models in which low wages discourage effort (e.g. the effort of workers in their jobs or the efforts of employers to automate or invest in their workforce) but at the aggregate level these feel like exercises in “rationalising apparently puzzling behaviour” that economists are attracted to. Remember the largely now debunked “expansionary fiscal contractions”? Raising wages to improve productivity looks like falling into the fallacy of reverse causality. History is unlikely to look kindly on such initiatives.
Question 2: What effect will the introduction of a CBDC have on UK banks?
Answer:
No or little effect
Confidence level:
Confident
Comment:
Outside of a financial crisis, there is limited appetite to “rock the boat” with financial innovation. This means that the role of a newly-launched central bank digital currency will, by design, likely to be limited. Radical proposals are unlikely to fly, so it is difficult to see sufficient disruption to upend 800 years of traditional banking.
The CFM surveys informs the public about the views held by prominent economists based in Europe on important macroeconomic and public policy questions. Some surveys focus specifically on the UK economy (as the CFM is a UK research centre), but surveys can in principle focus on any macroeconomic question for any region. The surveys shed light on the extent to which there is agreement or disagreement among these experts. An important motivation for the survey is to give a more comprehensive overview of the beliefs held by economists and in particular to include the views of those economists whose opinions are not frequently heard in public debates.
Questions mainly focus on macroeconomic and public policy topics. Although there are some questions that focus specifically on the UK economy, the setup of the survey is much broader and considers questions related to other countries/regions and also considers questions not tied to a specific economy.
The surveys are done in collaboration with the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR).
Towards a High-Wage, High-Productivity Economy
Question 2: What is your evaluation of the following statement: “A well-designed government-stipulated wage increase can lead to higher productivity”?
Question 1: Which of the following statements most closely reflects your understanding of the relationship between productivity and wages.
Monetary Policy and Inequality
Question 2: What role should inequality play in the monetary policy decisions (interest rate policy and quantitative easing)?
Question 1: How large is the impact of monetary policy on the joint distribution of income and wealth?
Central Bank Digital Currency for the UK
Question 2: What effect will the introduction of a CBDC have on UK banks?
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