Monthly Archives: October 2010
Son Preference: Statistical, Economic and Policy Significance
My Economy Lab column this week is about Missing women in China – and Canada too? Recent research by Douglas Almond, Lena Edlund, and WCI regular Kevin Milligan has found evidence of "son preference" – families planning their children to make sure that they have at least one son – within some ethnic groups in […]
Economy Lab: Why Canada’s manufacturing sector is dwindling
That's the title of my latest post on the Globe and Mail's Economy Lab site.
Currency wars and forced dissaving
The Fed is the loan placement officer for the world's central banks. The US government is the Fed's borrower of last resort. The forced loans can be called in at any time the lender wishes. People are different; that's why they trade. Sometimes that trade will take place between people who live in the same […]
Throwing Some Data on the Discussion – Federal Government Revenue
Since a discussion has developed in An updated history of the federal budget balance about where the Federal government gets their tax revenue from. Without comment, here is a chart. The data is federal government only, from CANSIM 385-0001.
An updated history of the federal budget balance
I did a round of interviews for CBC radio on Tuesday after the federal government's fiscal update was released, and it was often remarked that the 2009-10 deficit of $55.6b was the largest ever. I suppose I should have said that it sounds even larger if you say it was 5.56 trillion cents. These numbers […]
The quick and dirty way of putting money into macro
This post is really about maths, dark ages, and understanding macro. There are two ways of putting monetary exchange into a macroeconomic model: the proper way; and the quick and dirty way. Keynesians generally use the quick and dirty way. That's OK. But there may be problems if people don't understand what you are doing. […]
Saving by buying lottery tickets
Another sad news day. An older woman, living on a fixed income. Faced with an emergency, she had paid for purchases with a department store credit card. The card's interest rate, including service charges, was 29 percent. She was barely able to pay the interest on the card. To reduce the amount owing was impossible. […]
Why would we assume that high earners are price takers in the labour market?
Greg Mankiw's column in the New York Times makes the point that available evidence – in the US as well as Canada – suggests that high earners have higher labour supply elasticities than do workers lower down in the income distribution. As a result, increasing income tax rates on high earners would have disproportionately stronger […]
Stocks and bonds, and capital and money
How will we know that "QE2" is working? Judging from rising stock and bond prices, some will conclude it's working already, even though we haven't seen it yet (which is no surprise, because expected future monetary policy matters as much or more than current monetary policy). But I'm waiting for stock and bond prices to […]
Referees: the ultimate scarce resource
Every paper published in an academic journal goes through "peer review". It is sent out to two or three external reviewers, who evaluate the manuscript for originality, sound research methods, and so on. Unfortunately the quantity of manuscripts submitted to journals outstrips the number of people willing to review them, and the system is in […]
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
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