Monthly Archives: August 2011
Turning an interesting topic into a research hypothesis
On a recent visit to a small Bulgarian town, I was struck by the gardens. There were no lawns or hostas. Instead every inch of every garden was planted with fruit and vegetables. To me, this is an interesting topic. Why are Bulgarians so much more prone to vegetable gardening than Canadians? Yet how can […]
The macroeconomics of double pole dancing
The stupidest thing we do in macroeconomics is draw a downward-sloping IS curve. It's the stupidest thing we do, because we know it's stupid. (And I've done it hundreds of times.) And because we do this stupid thing, we associate tight money with high interest rates. Unless of course we are someone like Scott Sumner, […]
US AAA: bleg and random thoughts
First the Bleg: since I'm so useless at questions like this, what is Canada's own history of bond ratings? Have Canada's federal bonds been upgraded or downgraded often in the past? What were the circumstances? Did it make much difference to anything? (Or any other countries, other than Canada and the US, for that matter, […]
The exogeneity-plausibility trade-off
Back in the day, economists would run a regression explaining earnings in terms of education, experience, and other variables, and then go home at night feeling they had accomplished something. But nowadays it takes a few clicks to download data from the university library, and anyone who can type "regress earnings education experience" into a […]
A simple Keynesian-monetarist brain-teaser
Mostly for fun. Mostly for economics undergraduates. But I think there may be some serious lessons too. Sometimes I like to really push a model, into an extreme limiting case. To see if I can still get my head around it. To see if my intuition is lining up with what the math is telling […]
Aggregate supply and relative supply — and demand.
Micro and macro are different. We have to be careful about drawing macro conclusions from what happens at the micro level. We can't just extrapolate. This is in response to Casey Mulligan's post on evidence that supply matters. He draws macro conclusions about aggregate supply from micro evidence about relative supply.
ZMP workers and output quotas
Imagine, just imagine, that the government put a quota on the total output of, say, cars. Because some rabid environmentalists told them to. The result would be a drop in employment of auto workers. Some of those workers, who had skills useful in other sectors, would be able to find jobs elsewhere. Others, who had […]
The monetary policy of last resort — currency reform.
The monetary policy of last resort is to get rid of the old money and start a new one. "Currency reform". I can just remember this policy being mooted in the 1970's. What happens if tightening monetary policy fails to break entrenched inflationary expectations and an ever-increasing inflationary spiral? It was the ace in the […]
Forecasting the Future
I've always been a fan of science fiction and the other day came across an old anthology of Canadian science fiction on my downstairs shelf that contains a copy of a pamphlet written in 1883 forecasting what Canada was supposed to be like in 1983. The actual author is apparently unknown but wrote the pamphlet […]
Why Might the Premium on Labour Experience Have Increased?
Labour economics was one of my areas at Rochester, but I have not studied it since I left. As such, to say I have not kept up with the literature would be to put it mildly. What follows is an experiment in using "the economic way of thinking" and not based on any research. […]
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
Recent Comments