Monthly Archives: December 2012
The depressing job of grading exams
I have a very good job, and I'm well paid to do it. The only part of my job I don't like is grading exams. I have just finished grading 30 exams for my graduate course and 300 exams for my first year course.
The Macroeconomics of Middle Earth
Smaug the dragon is typically viewed as a fiscal phenomenon, depressing economic activity by burning woods and fields, killing warriors, eating young maidens, and creating general waste and destruction. Yet peoples – whether elvish, dwarvish, or human – have considerable capacity to rebuild. Why did the coming of Smaug lead to a prolonged downturn in […]
Giving Deadlines
Last summer, while walking the streets of Kingston, I encountered a wandering horde of business economists, and joined them for drinks. We got onto behavioural economics and financial decision-making, and one of the business economics folks started talking about the charitable donations deadline. It would be a good idea, he argued, to move the charitable donations […]
Capital and interest in the steady state
My meandering musings. Mostly to try to clarify my own thoughts. Read at your own risk. What's wrong with this picture?
Does not ship to this address
Dad wants a golf ball retriever for Christmas. I found the perfect one on Amazon – the #1 selling Callaway 15 foot golf ball retriever for $27.80. But when I went to check out my purchase, the dread message appeared: "Does not ship to this address." I had been browsing on amazon.com, not amazon.ca.
Technology, preferences, and wages; kinks and curves, Moseley and Krugman.
Look at the red curve PF1 and the blue curve PF2 in this picture. Ignore everything else: That's the picture Paul Krugman drew, showing how a capital-biased change in technology would shift the production function.
Economics of the Apocalypse
Well December 21st is almost upon us and with it the end of the Mayan calendar cycle and the anticipated arrival of the end of the world or the end of the world as we know it. Well, what do the economic indicators tell us about how this fundamental shift may be accounted for by […]
Does monopoly power cause inflation?
I am far too clued out about people and politics to understand the sub-text(?) behind Mark Thoma's short post. But this is a lovely exam question, that any macroeconomist ought to be able to take a crack at. And it reminds me of my youth in the early 1970's, when Milton Friedman was arguing, against […]
Money and bond bubbles: a parable
I'm using this fable to try to clarify my thoughts. Suppose, just suppose, that Nortel shares had sticky prices. Rather than adjusting almost instantly to ensure market-clearing equilibrium, the price of Nortel shares adjusted slowly over time in response to excess demand or supply of Nortel shares. That would mean that uninformed traders, who knew […]
The dirty secret of economics education
It's hardly a secret to anyone who's worked in an economics department: some students enrol in economics because they want to study something that seems vaguely useful, but they don't have the grades, or the mathematics and language skills, to make it in business or engineering.
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
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