Monthly Archives: July 2012
Worrying about the Canadian housing market, Part 2: The effects of higher leverage
In a previous post on the housing market, I noted that we were unlikely to see the sorts of interest rate increases that would generate increases in mortgage payments of the size we saw in the early 1980s (up to 60%). And it's a good thing too, because most new homeowners are not as able […]
Worrying about the Canadian housing market, Part 1: Higher interest rates
Like Nick, I've been thinking and worrying about the Canadian housing market, but not blogging about it. I've decided that it's worth putting some points out for discussion on the topic, if only because it's something we should be talking more about. I've broken it down to three separate posts: the second is here and […]
Oil, art, and silver plate
Damian Ortega's sculpture False Movement (Stability and Economic Growth) consists of three oil barrels perched upon a rotating platform. It's a politically motivated art work – "Stability and Economic Growth" was a Mexican election campaign slogan – with an unsubtle message. An oil-based economy is precarious and vulnerable to collapse; the appearance of economic growth is false […]
Unit roots and pro-cyclical fiscal policy
This is something I have long wondered about. And reading Jeff Frankel's complaints (HT Mark Thoma) about pro-cyclical fiscal policy made me wonder about it again. And I do mean "wonder about". I am not at all sure that this idea is right, or even theoretically coherent. But I wonder if it might be. In […]
Growth and Development: The Very Long Run
Well, though still on the road, I’m back in Canada after a conference trip to South Africa where I was part of a session on the analysis of late nineteenth/early twentieth century wealth in Britain and its Dominions using probate records. For a summary of my trip, click here. There was a multitude of interesting […]
A libertarian at liberty
Laura Ingalls Wilder left the royalties from the Little House in the Prairie series to her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane. Rose had no living children of her own, so she bequeathed the rights to the Little House series to Roger MacBride. One account of why Wilder left everything to MacBride is the adopted grandson theory: MacBride was […]
Interpreting coefficients right: does it matter?
Econometricians spend their lives trying coming up with new and better estimation techniques. Some of the ideas are excellent but impractical ("Just find a suitable instrumental variable"), and some complicate matters for minimal benefit (some argue that using logit or probit rather ordinary least squares estimation falls into this category). So when I stumble across […]
Trill Perpetuities, and dynamic inefficiency under uncertainty
A trill perpetuity is a bond, which promises to pay the owner a one trillionth share of nominal GDP (that's the "trill" bit), every year forever (that's the "perpetuity" bit). Trills, AFAIK, do not exist, though economists have thought about them. Perpetuities do exist (but are rare). Trill perpetuities do not exist. But they are […]
Things I think about and worry about but don’t blog about
I mean macroeconomic things, not just cars and canoeing and stuff. This is another "selection bias in blogging" post. Probably a more important selection bias than the one I talked about in my previous post. If you thought that my blog posts are about all the things in macroeconomics I think are important, you would […]
Strategy space and the theory of monetary policy Two
Industrial Organisation economists have known since 1883 that strategy space matters. To say the same thing another way, Industrial Organisation economists have believed in fairies ever since 1883, when a French mathematician proved the existence of fairies in oligopoly theory. Industrial Organisation economists, at least by stereotype, tend to be very practical down-to-earth people, quite […]
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
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