Monthly Archives: December 2006
How a not-completely-stupid idea became a multi-billion-dollar policy mistake
Another step in the long, slow, agonising death of a white elephant: the federal government is selling land it had expropriated for the Mirabel airport back to its original owners. If you have the benefit of thirty years’ worth of hindsight, the Mirabel airport is a pretty easy project to mock: it made many of […]
Welfare costs of the business cycle and the equity premium
In many ways, Robert Lucas’ famous estimate of the welfare costs of the business cycle is a restatement of the equity premium puzzle. If you take a standard model in which consumer preferences are time-separable, iso-elastic and have ‘plausible’ levels of risk aversion, then the fluctuations in marginal utility associated with unanticipated movements in consumption […]
How much should politicians be paid? And who should pay them?
The proposal to increase Ontario MPP’s pay has elicited the usual flurry of indignation: "It’s remarkable that they would have the chutzpah, the nerve, I mean gonads the size of a canal horse, to introduce legislation like this…" Whenever politicians try to vote themselves a pay increase, a certain amount of scepticism is warranted. But […]
Labour market flexibility and interprovincial migration
The most important development in the Canadian economy over the past 5 years has been the 40% appreciation of the CAD-USD exchange rate since January 2002, largely due to the increase in the price of oil and other commodities. The effects have been predictable: booms in the mining and oil sectors, and hard times for […]
An ode to my home town
This video even made the news. I dissolve into helpless laughter every time I watch it: these kids are the 21st century equivalent of Stephen Leacock.
2% of the population owns 50% of a very, very poor proxy for economic welfare
From a study that has generated some headlines: The richest 2% of adults in the world own more than half of global household wealth according to a path-breaking study released today by the Helsinki-based World Institute for Development Economics Research of the United Nations University (UNU-WIDER). The most comprehensive study of personal wealth ever undertaken […]
There’s a sucker born every Christmas shopping season
The electric BBQ marshmallow toaster:
The #1 reason to fear a hard landing in the US: There are no cushions
A US recession seems inevitable now. Unfortunately for those of us who would be negatively affected by this development, US policy-makers have, in their wisdom, stripped themselves of the means to attenuate its effects. Monetary policy: The Fed didn’t stop raising interest rates in August because it thought that inflation was under control; it did […]
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
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