Monthly Archives: January 2011
University crashes
The optimal size of a university is always a little bit bigger than its actual size. More precisely, the size of a university doesn't really matter. What does matter is whether it's growing or shrinking. A growing university is easy to manage. If you need to grow one department relative to another, you hire people […]
The War on Demand, and the short-side rule.
Paul Krugman thinks the War on Demand is strange. I think it's weird. But I've got a different take on what's happening. [Update: Paul Krugman responds. "Nick Rowe makes a good point: most of the time, in market economies, sellers feel constrained while buyers don’t. I’m somewhat surprised that he doesn’t mention why: it’s because […]
Faith as a substitute for savings
Saving for retirement is a gamble. You live, you win, because you reap the benefits of your thrift; you die, you lose, because you sacrificed enjoyment for no good reason. Historically, retirement saving was even more of a gamble than it is today. In 1810, world life expectancy was less than 40 years (see this […]
Inequality and debt: the soft bigotry of low expectations
"The poor don't have enough income to save, and can't help going into debt to the rich. Debt is caused by inequality". That statement is wrong on many levels. It's wrong theoretically. It's wrong empirically. But most of all, it's wrong because it might make inequality worse. It's the soft bigotry of low expectations. Providence […]
Tracking the Bank of Canada’s forecasts during the recession
Globe and Mail journalist Jeremy Torobin called me a while back to talk about Bank of Canada forecasts for this article, and that call prompted me to go back and look at how the Bank's forecasts evolved during the recession.
Three ZMPs and two Co-ordination failures
"ZMP" stands for "Zero Marginal Product". It should really stand for "Zero Value Marginal Product". Can an additional worker produce no additional goods of any value? Is that why they are unemployed? Yes, but. There are three types of ZMP. Two of them are based on two different types of coordination failure. The disagreement between […]
High Canadian Dollar Damaging to Exporters. An (Unexpectedly) Rising One Moreso
This is a post I've been meaning to write for months, but I couldn't find the words to do so. Instead I've decided to create a very simple microeconomic model to illustrate my basic point – that since prices are sticky, an unexpectedly rising Canadian dollar can do more damage to an exporter's bottom line […]
The decline of American economists and the European cultural revolution
In 1991, two thirds of the articles in Econlit, a comprehensive index of academic economic research, were written by people based in North America. By 2006, that share had dropped by one third to 45 percent. These numbers are taken from a recent working paper by Cardoso, Guimaraes and Zimmermann. Their evidence suggests that the […]
Cyclical productivity growth and the manufacturing sector
This post was written by Simon van Norden of HEC-Montréal. Here is a quick graph from FRED of US economy-wide vs manufacturing employment growth: One of the questions that I've had is whether the more rapid productivity growth in aggregate was the result of (a) faster productivity growth across lots of sectors, or (b) concentrating […]
Partial vs General equilibrium lumps of labour
Does an increase in productivity cause labour demand to increase or decrease? The answer to that question, and how we go about answering it, depends on whether we are talking about one small sector of the economy (partial equilibrium), or the economy as a whole (general equilibrium). (I was doing general equilibrium in my previous […]
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
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