Monthly Archives: November 2014
Beware middle-aged men waving feminist flags
On December 12, 2006, Ontario ended "mandatory retirement." As of that date, employers could no longer base termination decisions on an employee's age. Ontario was following the lead of Quebec and Manitoba, which stopped having a standard retirement age in the early 1980s. Within a couple of years, mandatory retirement had effectively ended right across […]
Short Run vs Long Run order of moves between monetary and fiscal authorities
Who moves first, and who moves last? In a game between the monetary authority and the fiscal authority, the order of moves matters. Just like in Stackelberg duopoly, where the effect of an increase in one firm's quantity will depend on whether the other firm is the leader and has already chosen its quantity, or […]
Economists aren’t in the prediction business – and that’s a good thing
Last year one of my students* was trying to explain why immigrants struggle in the job market. His regressions weren't working, so he switched things round a bit. Using 2006 Census data, he found that people in Newfoundland are 30 percentage points less likely to be immigrants than people in Ontario. People with PhDs are […]
A short history of the Canadian one per cent
Any sensible policy designed to address the concentration of income at the top of the Canadian income distribution over the past thirty years or so has to be based on a working model that explains how and why it happened in the first place. And we still don't have one. We still don't even have […]
Is economics really a dismal science for women?
Donna Ginther and Shulamit Kahn have just published a paper that tracks thousands of American academics from the time they first get their PhDs through to their tenure and promotion decisions. They conclude: Economics is the one field where gender differences in tenure receipt seem to remain even after background and productivity controls are factored in and […]
Fragility of Nash equilibria and Neo-Fisherites
I hope that I am reinventing the wheel by writing this post. And that some game theorist has already written something much better on the same subject. (If not, then they should have done.) But I need a game theorist to tell me about it and explain it to me, in simple language (if possible). […]
Reverse-engineering David Andolfatto’s and Stephen Williamson’s Neo-Fisherian paper
Stephen has a new post defending the Neo-Fisherian perspective. He links to a new paper he and David wrote (pdf). It is not an easy paper. This is what I think is the intuition behind the results. Start with the Fiscal Theory of the Price Level, where B is the nominal stock of government "bonds", […]
The over-investment and under-saving theory of the ZLB
This post is ironic. I have a really neat new theory of what causes countries to hit the Zero Lower Bound. It's got a beautifully counter-intuitive policy implication. The government needs to tax investment, or subsidise saving, to help the country escape the ZLB. What I need is a co-author to help me do some […]
The manufacturing trap
Oil prices are down lately, and over at the Broadbent Institute, Andrew Jackson is worried about the staples trap:
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
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