Monthly Archives: March 2013
A truly unimpressive accomplishment
Note: I have re-written this post in response to comments from biostatistician Thomas Lumley below. It made headlines around the world: Facebook ‘likes’ can reveal users’ politics, sexual orientation, IQ. According to Michal Kosinski, the lead researcher, information on "gender, race, political views, religion, sexual orientation, personality, IQ and so on," can be extracted from the […]
DSGE and me, or Why I ended up being an applied econometrician
I've never used Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium (DSGE) modeling techniques for pretty much the same reasons that Noah Smith outlines. I keep meaning to write a post about my misgivings about DSGE, and it appears now is the time. This is going to be a pretty technical and wonkish post, but there's really no way […]
Does public sector salary disclosure raise or lower salaries?
I don't know. Ontario's salary disclosure legislation, which requires that all salaries over $100,000 per year be made publicly available, was introduced by the Progressive Conservative government of Premier Mike Harris. That government had a somewhat unenthusiastic attitude towards MUSH (municipalities, universities, schools and hospitals) and the public service. The aim of the legislation was, […]
How can son preference persist?
In much of North Eastern India, there are 915 or fewer girls for every thousand boys – a sex ratio of more than 1.09 boys per girl. The persistence of such high sex ratios is puzzling, because it violates Fisher's Principle. In most species, the ratio of males to females is approximately one to one. […]
Why “culture” is a lousy explanation
In China, there are 6 boys born for every 5 girls; the result of an age old preference for sons combined with widespread use of sex selection technology. It's tempting to ascribe son preference to culture and leave it at that. However, for an economist, "culture" is a lousy explanation. It has no only trivial predictive […]
Teaching Mundell Fleming
The Mundell Fleming model is usually taught in second year macroeconomics. It's the open economy version of the ISLM model. This post is me disagreeing with Simon Wren-Lewis about teaching open economy macro (in textbooks and in the classroom). It is not a disagreement about open economy macroeconomics. Simon says that the textbook Mundell Fleming […]
Exchange controls, barter, and Cunning Plans
It was sometime in the 1960's. My uncle was teaching in Bulgaria. He wanted to buy stuff in Britain, but wasn't allowed to take much money out of Bulgaria. My father was farming in Britain. He wanted to buy stuff in Bulgaria, but wasn't allowed to take much money out of Britain. My uncle and […]
Good Luck Balancing the Federal Budget by 2015-16
Budgets are political and aspirational documents as they lay out a future course for the economy and government revenues and expenditures much as the government of the day would like them to be. Well, the 2013 federal budget is no exception as a bit of additional study of the budget numbers suggests that balancing the […]
What does the federal budget mean for the post-secondary sector?
Reforming universities is difficult. Cures tried elsewhere, like the UK Research Assessment Exercise, have induced people to publish more. Yet, to the extent that research comes at the cost of time spent teaching or engaging with students, "incentivizing" research could actually decrease the social value of universities. University reform is doubly difficult in Canada, […]
Crime and Police
Statistics Canada has released its most recent report on police personnel and expenditures and notes that police strength measured as officers per capita declined in 2012 by 1 percent. Moreover, there has been a slight decline in police expenditures overall with spending in 2011 totaling 12.9 billion – a decline of 0.7 percent from the […]
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
Recent Comments