Monthly Archives: March 2013
Collegiality as a positive externality
Yesterday my contact at the Globe asked me to write something about Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer's decision to scrap the company's teleworking policy. The final product is here.
Why don’t we have disinflation (until now)?
Just a quickie, between meetings. Paul Krugman asks "Why don't we have deflation?" His answer is: downward nominal wage rigidity. And he shows that graph of frequency distribution of nominal wage changes with a big spike at zero. I don't think that's quite the right question. So I don't think that's quite the right answer. […]
Can evolution save the elephant?
For centuries, elephants with large tusks have been targetted by hunters and poachers. The "unnatural selection" in favour of smaller-tusked elephants has resulted in a dramatic decrease in average tusk sizes right across Africa. Smaller tusks increase an individual elephant's probability of survival, by making him or her a less attractive target for poachers. But […]
Government Spending and Crime
I’ve been doing some data exploration on public sector spending and societal outcomes and have some preliminary results that have caused me to puzzle about what they might mean. I’ve been looking at annual data for OECD countries (33 countries) over the period 2000 to 2010 and the relationship between public sector size and crime […]
Financial Literacy Quiz
Today I'm trying to do some work with the Canadian Financial Capability Survey. This survey contains a test of financial literacy/knowledge, which I have reproduced below the fold:
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
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