Monthly Archives: April 2012
The impact of tax cuts on government revenues
An average person, asked to explain the impact of cutting taxes, might well reason: I have represented this argument in flow chart form to give it a spurious air of logical coherence. Yet any flow chart is only as good as the reasoning that underlies it. In this case, that reasoning is seriously incomplete.
Provincial Finances: An Estimate of “Tax Prices”
My previous post dealt with differences in provincial health spending and how on a per capita basis some provinces were substantially above the provincial average while others were not. One of the factors behind any government spending at the provincial level is own source revenue capacity so in light of some of the comments asking […]
A survey about rubrics
I use rubrics sometimes, and I'm curious to know if other people do as well, and how they feel about them, so here is a survey about rubrics: Rubric Survey I've put a couple of demographic questions on towards the end, but please feel free to skip them. Update: preliminary results over the fold.
An erratum on US employment flows during the recession
In my most recent post, I did some eyeball econometrics and missed something. It turns out that Canadian and US employment flows during the recession were not quite as dissimilar as I had thought. (Thanks to Dan Kervick in the comments for catching it.)
Flows in and out of employment during the recession
These are the slides I prepared for this conference a few weeks ago in Ottawa, in which I tried to get a handle on the gross flows in and out of employment during the recession, and how it compared to the US experience. It's actually the extended version of those slides; I ended up hacking […]
Where has all the research gone?
I would like to write something for Economy Lab on how difficult it has become to find older Government of Canada publications.
Living in a demand-side world
I know what it's like to live in a demand-side world, because I used to live in one. Let me tell you about it. Maybe it's like the world you live in.
How to answer “true, false, uncertain” questions
True, false, uncertain: "Natural gas price controls during the late 1970s hurt producers at the expense of consumers, but did improve economic efficiency." (Source) True, false, uncertain: "Assuming that the Ricardian Equivalence proposition holds in small open economy (SOE), a temporary tax cut will have no effects on the current account." (Source) From first year […]
Two more random arguments for microfoundations
1. Because it helps us understand micro better too. For example, suppose we found that macroeconomic models worked a lot better if we assumed that firms were monopolistically competitive rather than perfectly competitive. Even if you were a microeconomist with no interest in macroeconomics, that tells you something useful. It's one more bit of evidence […]
Is a Constitutional Challenge Public Health Care’s Next Arena?
Many Canadians believe that the Canada Health Act is the bulwark that is supposed to be protecting public health care and that it should ensure comparable levels of coverage across the country. Yet, if one examines per capita provincial government health spending, the evidence shows that there are major differences.
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
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