Author Archives: wciecon
The gendered impact of eliminating mandatory retirement
On March 6th, the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario released a report on the sustainability of university expenditures. One of the issues highlighted in the report was financial cost of eliminating standard retirement at age 65. As Simona Chiose reported in the Globe, Ontario professors "who are 66 and older have an average salary […]
Making guns obsolete
The US supposedly has a unique gun culture. Yet, for an economist, culture is a lousy explanation. We seek the origins of culture; the economic and social forces promoting and sustaining it. Hunting, frontier living, and war can explain how the US gun culture got started, but not its persistence. Gun-friendly rural areas are losing […]
The Balance of the Federation: Canada 1870 to 2016
My contribution to Maclean’s 2018 Chartapalooza was a plot of the federal government’s share of total government expenditure in Canada since 1870. The chart showed that until World War I, with the exception of period marked by the building of the federally subsidized CPR, the federal share of total government spending in Canada was approximately […]
Price Level Targeting targets the Stickiest Prices; Inflation Targeting targets the more Flexible Prices
And it's good to target the stickiest prices; and bad to target the more flexible prices. It means that recessions under inflation targeting can last as long as it takes for the stickiest prices to change. Which is bad. And it's especially bad for us old macroeconomists, who remember that the whole point of New […]
The best and worst paid names on the Ontario sunshine list
The Ontario government publishes an annual "Sunshine List". This is a dataset containing detailed salary information on every Ontario government employee earning over $100,000 per year. The list includes the salaries of public servants, also salaries of people who work in Ontario universities, hospitals, and other government agencies. A couple of conversations I had earlier […]
The Tale of the Two Cobblers (collusive price cuts)
Mostly for fun, and teaching. But I think it might matter. A village had two cobblers. The right-handed cobbler was best at making right shoes. The left-handed cobbler was best at making left shoes. So the villagers would buy one shoe from each cobbler. Other villages were some distance away, so the cobblers had monopoly […]
“Profits = Investment – Saving”
Or, "Profits = Expenditure – Income". Those are just alternative ways of saying the same thing, for a closed economy, if investment and saving include government investment and saving. Most economists will say that's wrong. And it is wrong by standard definitions, where aggregate expenditure and income are the same thing, and investment and saving […]
“Monetary Policy Accommodation” and Upward-sloping IS curves
If you believe that the IS curve slopes up, then what the Bank of Canada says about "monetary policy accommodation" makes sense. If you believe the IS curve slopes down, like in the textbooks, then it doesn't make sense. This is supposed to be a simple teaching post. My own mind is pretty simple anyway. […]
Theory does not say that equilibrium interest rates cannot be below growth rates (Part 1)
First I need to tell you why I am writing this post. I got two emails from Canadian economists saying they agreed with my post against "normalising" interest rates. The first email was from an academic macroeconomist. He asked me if I thought that calls for normalisation from bank economists were motivated by bank profitability. […]
Donald Trump is a Mercantilist
A lot of ink is being spilled on Donald Trump and his America First approach to trade negotiations which has generated considerable trepidation and angst in both Ottawa and Mexico City as NAFTA appears headed for termination. Donald Trump is obsessed with the concept of trade deficits – which the United States does have on […]
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
Recent Comments