Monthly Archives: March 2015
Overdrafts with 100% reserve banking
I was reading Frosti Sigurjonsson's proposal for monetary reform in Iceland. [Click on the document thingy halfway down the page.] His proposal is a variant on 100% reserve banking. I got stuck on page 72 and footnote 66, where he discusses overdrafts. This post is just my attempt to get my own head clear on […]
Funding and the Future of Ontario Universities
Well, the Council of Ontario Universities or COU is looking for a new President and CEO. The role of COU is to serve as a voice for the province’s university sector and help improve the public policies that affect the sector. As the ad for the position states: “As a member-based organization, COU provides the […]
Monetary policy in New Keynesian models is Gesellian
In one important respect, what we call "New Keynesian" macroeconomic models are in fact New Gesellian macroeconomic models. That's only in one respect, but it is important. Silvio Gesell proposed a tax on currency. The higher the tax rate, the faster people would spend that currency. A tax is a negative subsidy. The higher the […]
Buyer’s liquidity vs seller’s liquidity
Liquid goods are easy to buy and sell. Illiquid goods are hard to buy and sell. I think we need to break up "buy and sell" into its two component parts. In a buyer's market, goods are easy to buy and hard to sell. The same good is liquid from the buyer's perspective, and illiquid […]
Asymmetric home bias and the transfer problem
A random thought on Germany and Greece. If apple producers and banana producers have the same symmetric Cobb-Douglas preferences U = A0.5.B0.5 the competitive equilibrium has half the apple crop being exchanged for half the banana crop. But if the apple producers only like apples, and refuse to eat bananas, the relative price of apples […]
A Resource Bust and Yet…
The OECD has cut its growth forecast for Canada citing the drop in oil and commodity prices. With all the talk about the slowdown in the Canadian economy picking up steam and slow growth as a result of the drop in oil prices that began last spring, one might expect some job losses to start […]
The Children’s Fitness Tax Credit: A Study in (Academic) Incentives
The Children's Fitness Tax Credit gives parents a non-refundable tax credit to recognize the cost of registering children in sports. When the credit was first introduced, its cash value was $77.50 – the amount of the credit ($500) times the basic marginal tax rate (then 15.5%). The popularity of the credit among parents has led […]
David Levine’s accidental Monetarism
I confess this is a bit of a "Gotcha!". But it's a bit more than that as well. It illustrates the difficulty that people (even economists) have in "seeing" money. Brad DeLong flatters me (but he's right that this is right up my street), then sends me to David Levine. Here's the "money quote" (sorry).
Social blah blah blah
I've been asked to write a paper reviewing "social benefits" delivered through the personal income tax system. I have no idea what this means. In economics, "social benefits" refers to the benefit side of a social benefit/cost calculation; the increase in social welfare associated with a particular project or policy. It has little to do […]
Lump of Labour, Say’s Law, and the slope of the AD curve
I wrote this partly for Sandwichman, and mostly I wrote it because this same question crops up time and time again. It's a very old question, but it always looks like a new question if the technology is new enough. People in caves were probably arguing about whether 3-D printing robots flints would cause mass […]
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
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