Monthly Archives: January 2009
The (economic) benefits of civility
I can think of three benefits from people being civil, in arguments about economics (for example).
What do do with the $1.95/vote subsidy: Give it to the Parliamentary Budget Office
We all know that the Harper government's proposal to kill the the $1.95/vote subsidy for the federal political parties blew up in its face. But would it have been good policy? Andrew Coyne thinks so, and it's hard to see just what public policy goal is being served by giving public money to political parties. […]
Why can’t Ann get a credit card? A sample of one.
Ann's not her real name, but she's a real person, and she can't get a credit card. Is this normal, or part of the credit tightening reported on the Bank of Canada's latest Senior Loan Officer Survey? That's not a rhetorical question. I don't know the answer, and wondered if any reader did. Details below […]
Exogenous policy, endogenous policy……and improving policy
On Saturday I posted my views on why it is difficult to get good estimates of the effects of fiscal and monetary policy. On Sunday Greg Mankiw responded to (less than civil) criticism from Nate Silver. Here is the very short version: Nate Silver criticised Greg Mankiw for looking at the effects of an exogenous […]
Why there’s so little good evidence that fiscal (or monetary) policy works
Will fiscal (or monetary) policy work to prevent a recession? This is perhaps the central question of macroeconomics. We ought to know the answer, and we ought to have overwhelmingly good evidence to support our answer. But we don't. It's still being debated. There's a reason we don't have good evidence.
Debt and Wealth
Does an increase in debt mean a decrease in wealth? There's the accounting question, which should help us keep our heads straight. But there's also an economic question: what is the causal relation between debt and wealth?
A GST fiscal stimulus
There are a number of fiscal stimulus proposals out there, but none of them incorporate my suggestion for using the GST to promote an explicitly short-term stimulus and to ensure that the government's ability to pay for future spending is not permanently compromised. For those of you who have not been paying close attention [Cries […]
Housekeeping note: a search feature has been added. Should anything else be?
After more than three years and more than 400 posts, I'm no longer able to remember who said what where and when, so I've just followed the helpful instructions provided by Typepad and installed a search thingy on the sidebar. Does anyone have any requests about how the blog should be set up? Features to […]
Average Debt and Representative Agents
The representative agent is sometimes a useful conceptual fiction. What's the income of the average Canadian? How many hours does the average Canadian work? It's not just theoretical macroeconomists who ask those questions. But it is a useless fiction when we ask about debt. Or rather, at best it's useless; at worst it's dangerously misleading.
Maybe the Canadian recession will be short and shallow
As Menzie Chinn reports (I've seen other references, but Econbrowser is a sufficient statistic as far as these matters go), there seems to be some sort of consensus forecast to the effect that the US economy will bottom out about sometime around mid-2009, although there is a certain divergence of opinion about just how deep […]
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
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