Monthly Archives: July 2011
When are there NO gains from trade?
OK you trade theorists. I've got a question for you. It's the exact opposite question to the one you normally ask. When are there no gains from trade? Biologists need to know.
Is There a Hauser’s Law for Canada Too?
Economics has a number of “Laws” floating around that are rooted in empirical observation and then put forth as natural inexorable systemic laws. For example, in public finance, there is Wagner’s Law of Expanding State Activity, which links the size of the public sector to income. In health economics, there is Roemer’s Law, which […]
The Wealth Curse — why we are almost always less wealthy than we think we are
Wealth is an expectation about the future. Absent a complete set of futures markets, our expectations won't aggregate up, because our plans for the future are interdependent and almost always mutually inconsistent. Other people aren't planning to do what fulfilment of our own plans requires them to do. Our plans are going to be disappointed, […]
For better or for worse – or for insurance coverage?
One of the puzzling things about the United States is its extraordinarily high marriage rate. Among OECD countries, only Turkey and Cyprus have a higher rate of marriage (Source, OECD).
An unintended consequence of minimum wages?
I have a theory. Employers offer a wage consisting of monetary compensation plus non-monetary benefits. Non-monetary benefits include, for example, free or discounted coffee, flexible work hours, breaks, a safe working environment, and so on. They choose the combination of monetary and non-monetary compensation that allows them to hire the required workforce at the minimum […]
Eurozone fallout preparations?
1. If/when the Eurozone collapses, how will that affect countries in the rest of the world, like Canada? 2. What, if anything, can those countries do about it?
Louder Voices: The Corporate Welfare Bums (1972)
With a newborn at home, it is difficult to find the time or energy to do much outside of my day job (if it seems like I have gone AWOL, it is because I have). In what spare moments I have, if I'm not watching old World Series games on iTunes, I am reading classic […]
A Longer Term View of U.S. Public Debt
With the August 2nd deadline for raising the United States public debt ceiling looming, it might be useful to take a longer-term view on exactly how bad the US debt situation is at least with respect to the past.
A rant on inverse hyperbolic sine transformations
Right now I'm handling most of the wealth papers submitted to Review of Economics of the Household. Wealth data is, almost invariably, messy. The distribution of wealth has a long, thick, right hand tail – a good number people have wealth holdings in the million dollar range (most owners of mortgage-free single detached homes in […]
How do we get from here to Armageddon?
This is essentially a rerun of this earlier post, which produced no answers I found convincing. It's provoked by Livio's recent post, which produced comments raising questions similar to one that I've been asking for many months now. The question is: what are the mechanics behind "there's a housing bubble in Vancouver" (it's always Vancouver) […]
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
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