Author Archives: wciecon
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" […]
Statistics Canada’s historical housing cost data is wrong
In the early 1960s, Canadian economic historian Marvin McInnis started digging through the Dominion Bureau of Statistics archives, looking for city-level information on rental prices. While there, he discovered something strange and disturbing: A prominent theme of my career has been to reveal anomalies in what has been put forward as evidence. One instance is known only to me. […]
Milk is mind-bogglingly cheap.
The Canadian Cook Book was first published in 1923. My copy is the twentieth edition, published in 1949. It dates from the heyday of home economics, a time when scientific principles were being applied to domestic life. Recipes are mixed in with nutritional information, guidance on the finer points of etiquette, and what we could […]
Should professors tell students exactly what they expect?
Imagine, for a moment, that students acquire valuable human capital during their time at university. Imagine that the grades on a student's transcript reflect his or her level of human capital. Imagine that, every term, a professor uses examinations, term papers, and other assignments, to measure how much human capital each student has acquired over the […]
A Very Brief History of Federal Cash Transfers: Canada 1867 to 2017
This is a post in celebration of Canada’s 150th and similar in time span to my previous one on housing supply and dwelling starts. Canada is a federation and a key feature of its operation is a system of intergovernmental transfers between its fiscal tiers. Indeed, transfers and regional equity are enshrined in Section 36 […]
High Wages encourage Innovation?
High wages increase the benefits of an innovation that increases labour productivity. The higher the wage, the bigger the benefits of saving an hour of labour to produce the same quantity of goods. But if that innovation itself requires labour to think up the new idea, test it, and implement it, then high wages increase […]
L’affaire Potter
You are all, I think, familiar with the details of L'Affaire Potter, so I need not enumerate them here. If you aren't already familiar with this story, you probably don't care what I have to say about it, so you can skip the rest of this post. But as a Quebec-based academic with a weekly […]
Old and New Keynesian Multipliers: Cross-Section and Time-Series
Suppose you had an economy where half the agents are "Hand-To-Mouth" and have a Marginal Propensity to Consume of one (Ct=Yt), and the other half are "Autonomous" and have a Marginal Propensity to Consume of zero (Ct=At where At is exogenous with respect to their current income). If the two types of agents initially have […]
Real Interest on Reserves
A central bank issues currency and wants to target the price of apples in terms of that currency. So it opens an apple window, and posts a sign promising to buy or sell unlimited quantities of apples at $1 each. Done. Arbitrage ensures that the market price of apples in the economy is always $1 […]
We Are Adding Less to Housing Supply
Housing prices particularly in places like Toronto and Vancouver are still a big issue and what is driving them is the subject of debate. There is Josh Gordon’s recent policy paper, which places the main emphasis on demand side factors and there is the recent story raising alarm on Toronto’s “housing bubble”. There are of […]
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
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