{"id":46776,"date":"2025-09-27T17:17:20","date_gmt":"2025-09-27T17:17:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/46776\/"},"modified":"2025-09-27T17:17:20","modified_gmt":"2025-09-27T17:17:20","slug":"miran-overstated-immigration-argument-says-the-economist-who-wrote-the-paper","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/46776\/","title":{"rendered":"Miran overstated immigration argument, says the economist who wrote the paper"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last Friday I wrote <\/a>about new Fed Governor Stephen Miran and his argument for cutting rates by 150 basis points before year end.<\/p>\n

The crux of it was that Trump’s immigration policy changes would “exert quite a lot of disinflation” by lowering the price of houses and rents. He also cited 1.5 million migrants leaving the country, which is on the extreme end of any reasonable estimates.<\/p>\n

In any case, when he laid out his broader argument, he cited a research paper that used a sudden surge in Cuban immigrants to Miami 45 years ago. The idea was that a flow of about 1% in immigration would boost rents by 1%.<\/p>\n

However when Miran used it, he didn’t use the total population of the US (340 million) and instead used the 100 million people who rent. By lowering the denominator, he overstated the impact by three fold.<\/p>\n

Albert Saiz, the MIT economist who wrote the paper, spoke with Reuters<\/a>:<\/p>\n

“If you did the calculation using the right magnitudes, you get 1
\ndivided by 340 million – that\u2019s about 0.29 percent a year,” Saiz said in
\n an interview. “Obviously population growth does impact the price of
\nhousing, but the magnitude isn’t big enough to justify major changes in
\nmonetary policy.”<\/p>\n

Miran has argued that rent inflation will fall by 2 percentage points through 2027.<\/p>\n

“One might characterize this view on rental inflation as optimistic,”
\nMiran said. “However, I believe forecasters have underappreciated the
\nsignificant impact of immigration policy on rent inflation\u2014both on the
\nway up and, now, on the way down.”<\/p>\n

Honestly, I’m sympathetic to Miran’s argument about rent as a population surge in Canada led to skyrocketing rents that are now reversing. The thing is, it’s the same kind of one-off effect as tariffs, which Miran insists on looking through. The analysis also ignores that inflationary effects of depleting the immigrant labor supply.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Last Friday I wrote about new Fed Governor Stephen Miran and his argument for cutting rates by 150…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":46777,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[138,219,111,139,69],"class_list":["post-46776","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-economy","tag-business","tag-economy","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46776","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=46776"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46776\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/46777"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=46776"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=46776"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=46776"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}