Monthly Archives: July 2011
Why Canadian economists should worry less about productivity
Canada's famously low levels of productivity and low rates of productivity growth have preoccupied Canadian economists for decades. But increased productivity – as it is usually measured – is not a sufficient condition for higher standards of living. It's not even necessary. For instance, the post-2001 fall in Canadian productivity is simply a mathematical artifact […]
Video Series on Generation Y and Employment
The Globe and Mail has been producing some terrific videos on economics topics. Okay, that's a bit self-serving, since Armine Yalnizyan and I were in a series on the future of manufacturing in Canada, but honestly, there are some gems here! I like two recent ones by Philip Oreopoulos: Why millenials aren't getting jobs and What Gen Y […]
The escalating cost of cheating
Custom essay network offers to "custom write your college essays to match your language skills and academic level, whether you are a school, pre-college student having English as your second language or you are a Ph.D. student skilled in the language….In our work we use the same plagiarism scanning services as the most of your teachers use. […]
What does lower US GDP mean for Canadian monetary policy?
A thought-experiment. A rather real thought-experiment. Assume you are Governor of the Bank of Canada. Your job is set monetary policy to bring inflation to the 2% target in the "medium term". You are just about to conclude a meeting where you will decide what target for the overnight rate you will set at the […]
The US GDP revisions aren’t as bad as you think. They’re much worse.
The BEA's advance estimate for 2011Q2 GDP growth was accompanied by news that 2011Q1 growth had been revised from 1.8% to 0.4%. This is bad enough, but the data revisions are much, much worse than that. Here is a graph of the data that were archived by the St Louis Fed last month, along with […]
A preliminary estimate for Canadian 2011Q2 GDP growth
The May 2011 GDP numbers are out, so it's time for my quarterly attempt to provide an estimate for quarterly GDP growth a month before Statistics Canada releases its first estimates – the most recent exercise is here. This is done by using simple linear regression model of monthly GDP growth on monthly LFS data […]
Smart Meters and EMF: The Green Party Goes Off-The-Rails
A lot has been made on Elizabeth May's anti-wifi twitter comments yesterday (Kate Heartfield of the Ottawa Citizen has a nice summary). What is far more concerning to me is the Green Party announcing a new anti-Smart Meter policy for British Columbia due to concerns about EMF radiation. This leads to a couple of questions:
Wealth and Its Distribution: Tomorrow is Yesterday
Wealth and income inequality is a big issue and I thought some historical perspective on wealth inequality might be interesting given that my research to date has led me to conclude that little has changed for the bottom of the wealth distribution at least in terms of relative wealth shares. While there has been the […]
Taxes and the value of paper money
Does the value of an intrinsically worthless (paper) money depend on the government's power to tax? I am going to answer this question from a quantity-theory perspective. The short answer is "yes". But the full answer is different from some other theories that also answer "yes". Those of you who already understand the modern quantity […]
Can the buck “break the buck”?
Obviously not, in any literal sense. But this might be a metaphor worth exploring. Are central banks like money market mutual funds? What happens to the value of the US Dollar, or the Euro, if the risk of sovereign default causes the value of a central bank's assets to fall below the value of its […]
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
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