Monthly Archives: August 2006
Average cost pricing at Statistics Canada
When I was a graduate student, I was given to understand that the reason why so many Canadian economists worked with American data was that US-based journals weren’t interested in publishing work done using non-US data. This impression was of course completely wrong. If anything, US journals (and their referees!) seem to have a prejudice […]
Why would unions oppose a basic income?
The Berkeley Electronic Press has a new journal: Basic Income Studies. The Basic Income – also known as the Guaranteed Annual Income (GAI) in Canada – is a proposal that I’m very much favourably disposed to, even though I’m not familiar with all of the technical details. I took a look at its inaugural issue, […]
Marginal tax rates: flat and fuzzy
I noted earlier that average tax rates in Canada are an approximately constant fraction of income. What about marginal income tax rates (MITRs)?
The Globe and Mail scores another meaningless scoop
A worrisome trend at the national paper of record: first this, and now yet another pointless article congratulating itself for making use of the Access to Information Act to get information that was already well-known, but apparently not well-understood: Ottawa urged to push foreign takeovers; Outside investment has a ‘net benefit,’ internal files suggest:Federal officials […]
Canada already has a flat tax
I suspect that the typical Canadian – and this includes economists – has the impression that the tax system in Canada is progressive. Maybe too progressive, or not progressive enough according to their taste, but progressive. It turns out that this isn’t the case. According to this paper (pdf), the most recent study that tries […]
Why oh why, etc: Canadian edition
In which the Canadian business press goes out of its way to track down a meaningless piece of information, and interprets it in the worst possible way (h/t to true dough) : Bloomberg: Canadian Dollar Still Undervalued After Rally, Memorandum Says: The Canadian dollar is undervalued and doesn’t yet reflect the benefit to the country’s […]
Four new AEA journals
From an e-mail I just received: Following a three-year study and discussion of the subject, the Ad Hoc Committee on Journals (Robert Hall [chair], Judith Chevalier, David Colander, Peter Diamond, Alan Krueger, and Daniel Rubinfeld) recommended to the Executive Committee in April 2006 that the Association start four aggregated field journals, each published in four […]
The Fed faces a tricky rebound
Although the Bank of Canada and the Fed have both chosen to stop increasing interest rates, they did so for very different reasons. When the Bank of Canada called a halt to interest rate increases last month, it did so because it thought it had hit the sweet spot – inflation on target, output at […]
The new Governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia and I have something in common
We both did our MA at the University of Western Ontario during the academic year 1984-85. I’m pretty sure that Glenn Stevens was the best student of our cohort (I think I was second), and I remember him telling me that UWO tried very hard to persuade him to stay on to do a PhD. […]
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
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