Monthly Archives: May 2017
Remembering Peter George
Peter James George (1941-2017) died at home April 27th after a short illness. His passing leaves a remarkable legacy as an economic historian and academic leader. Peter grew up in the Toronto Islands, graduated from the University of Toronto, took up a faculty position in the Economics Department at McMaster University in 1965 and served […]
Job tenures and the gig economy
A few weeks ago, Alex Usher drew my attention to this post by the Pew Research Center, on job tenure patterns of 18-35 year-olds in the United States. The takeaway point was that, contrary to an oft-repeated narrative about the "new gig economy", job tenure patterns among millennials resemble those of the generation previous. Of […]
Five things that can help you get your conference submission accepted
Over the past few months, I've been putting together the program for the upcoming Canadian Economics Association meetings: http://economics.ca/2017/en/. It's a reasonable sized conference – this year we had almost 900 submissions – and quite a few papers were rejected. Yet often papers were not accepted for conference program simply because the author made an easily […]
Trade Wars: Then and Now
I've got a new op-ed in the Globe, arguing that, to pull away from the US, Canada must look to its immigrants. The first draft of that article was much longer, and begun with a long discussion of the Smoot-Hawley act. I've reproduced that first draft below: “What ifs” that were unthinkable six months ago […]
PhD Vouchers
Canadian universities have strong incentives to create PhD programs, and admit students into those programs. This is because provincial governments typically provide generous funds for each PhD student a university takes in. Also, PhD students are useful and cheap workers. Moreover, having a PhD program raises an academic unit's status, by signalling that it is a "research" […]
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
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