Author Archives: wciecon
Thomas K Rymes, 1932 – 2011.
TK Rymes' publication list begins with a disclaimer "Those marked with an asterisk I consider to be worth reading." That line is typical TK – direct, honest, and self-deprecating. After all, how many academics would suggest, even by implication, that much of their work is not worth reading? One of the first asterisked publications on the […]
Debt and bi-modal demographics
Young people borrow, to finance school, house, car, and kids. Their debt reaches a maximum, somewhere around age 35. Then they start to pay off their debt, and save for retirement, and so reach a maximum stock of savings somewhere around age 65. So, if there were a big bulge in the population at around […]
This is what a balance-sheet recession looks like, and it’s not pretty
I had never heard the expression "balance-sheet recession" before this recent episode, and it's time I got around to a comparison of the household balance sheets of the US and Canada. Of all my "Canada is not the US" posts, this is the one that makes me most grateful.
Republican profs give out less egalitarian grades. So what?
A number of bloggers (for example Mark Perry, Catherine Rampell, Greg Mankiw) have picked up Bar and Zussman's recent paper on Partisan Grading. (Downloadable here, forthcoming here) Bar and Zussman take data on student grades, student SAT scores, and professor political affiliation, and find that: …student grades are linked to the political orientation of professors: […]
Foreign ownership and foreign control
Friday's release of Canada's international investment position for 2011Q1 shows that Canada is a net debtor nation, as it has been for its entire history – with the notable exception of a fleeting moment that was subsequently revised away. But we're not net debtors in all asset classes: Canadian direct holding of assets abroad are […]
Transfer Dependency’s New Friends
Well, I decided to finish off my postings on provincial revenues and go to the Federal Fiscal Reference Tables which provide a federal transfer revenue variable for each province from 1987/87 to 2009/10 as well as provincial revenues. I have a plot of nominal per capita transfer revenues and not surprisingly it shows an upward […]
The Future of Manufacturing – Reading and Watching List
At 1PM today I am doing a chat on "The Future of Manufacturing in Canada", which my former students know is a favourite issue of mine. You can access the chat here. Hope you all can make it! I am certain I'll be referencing a number of reports and resources in the chat. In the […]
Population aging and labour’s share of income
There aren't many statistical regularities in macroeconomics, and very few of them are as important as the apparent long-term stability of the shares of income that go to capital and labour. This 'stylized fact' was first noted by Nicholas Kaldor back in 1957, and his list of stylized facts shows up in every macroeconomics sequence. […]
Canadian mortgage debt
I feel bad about writing too many abstruse theory posts. How many angels can dance on the head of a monetary pin? Here's something more practical. Think of it as a companion to Livio's post about Canadian house prices. Why would we worry if Canadian house prices are overvalued? One important reason (though not the […]
The monetary transmission mechanism
The reason that New Keynesians don't like talking about the supply of money and velocity has nothing to do with problems in defining the supply of money, the instability of velocity, or the instability of the money supply multiplier. As I argued in my last two posts, similar criticisms would apply equally to the New […]
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
Recent Comments