Monthly Archives: August 2007
Cross-country comparisons of inequality in market and disposable income: Policy matters
This graph is taken from a recent Luxembourg Income Study (LIS) working paper (45-page pdf): The countries are arranged in ascending order of inequality in disposable income, and the Nordic countries take four of the top five positions. What strikes me is the extent to which this is due to government policy: the Gini coefficient […]
Nordic vs American exceptionalism
Megan McArdle ponders the Nordic model, and gets pretty much everything wrong. She indulges in the oft-repeated and almost-never-substantiated claim that "things that work in small homogeneous countries don’t work in big, heterogeneous ones". The Nordics are applying standard textbook rules of taxation. There’s nothing exceptional about that. Germany is cited as evidence for the […]
Maybe Steve Levitt should start drinking Canadian beer
I really feel for Rob Oxoby. He wrote a joke paper (8-page pdf) about AC-DC while killing time at a Vancouver airport bar, put it up on his web page, and passed it along to a couple of friends. Unfortunately for him, it eventually caught the attention of Steve Levitt. This put Oxoby in the […]
What will the Bank of Canada do?
The Bank of Canada’s next interest rate announcement is in two weeks: 13 days before the next FOMC. There’s any amount of speculation about what the Bank will do, and I’m more than happy to indulge in this game as well, but let’s look at some of the background: 1) The Bank of Canada has […]
“We blew it. But in our defense, people believed us”
Canada’s Dominion Bond Rating Service (DBRS) notes that its credibility horse has run away, and rushes to spin the barn door shut: DBRS rethinks the way it rates debt: Embattled credit rating agency DBRS Ltd. has launched a review of the way it rates asset-backed commercial paper in the wake of last week’s market freeze, […]
Worrying demographic fact o’ the day
From an article in the Bank of Canada Review (14-page pdf): Since 1980, the growth in labour input has accounted for just over half of the growth of real gross domestic product (GDP) in Canada. Most of this rise in labour input can be attributed to increases in the size of the working-age population and […]
Not Dutch Disease, it’s China syndrome
Statistics Canada has published a survey article (15-page pdf) that covers many of the points I’ve been making (eg: here, here and here) about how the Canadian economy has adjusted to the terms of trade shock induced by higher oil and commodity prices. Overall, the effects have been positive, or at least benign: The Canadian […]
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
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