Author Archives: wciecon
Live-tweeting the federal budget
So I opened up a twitter account yesterday – you may have noticed the button at the bottom of the sidebar at right. It's something of an experiment, and I'll probably just use it for things that I can't work up to a fully-fledged blog post. There are a lot of those. Today I used […]
The Debt of Strangers
Does this question make sense: "Is debt too high?"? It certainly makes sense for me to ask whether my debt is too high. Should I try to earn more income, reduce my consumption, or sell off some assets? And if a friend asks me whether his debt is too high, I could offer him advice […]
What measures should be in the federal budget?
The federal government brings down its budget on Thursday. From what I can gather from various media stories, the word is that it'll be pretty thin. The two-year stimulus package announced last year will continue as planned, and no new tax measures are expected. This thread asks the question: what would you like to see […]
Canada’s recovery is 30%-40% complete
Today's GDP release was a pleasant surprise: an annualised growth rate of 5.0% is more than we were expecting. The recovery is well underway, and depending on the measure you look at, something between 30% and 40% of the economic losses generated by the recession have been recovered.
Shouldn’t Taylor Rules include Fiscal Policy? The Fiscal exit strategy.
Most economists believe that for a given path of nominal interest rates chosen by the central bank, a looser fiscal policy (higher deficits, through lower taxes and/or higher spending) will cause higher Aggregate Demand, and therefore higher real output and/or inflation. Therefore, if a central bank is choosing a path for nominal interest rates in […]
“Fire-and-forget” fiscal policy
If you wanted to build a "fire-and-forget" fiscal policy, or where you at least minimised the chances you would ever again want to change any of the tax and spend rules, what would it look like? I was thinking about Stephen's question: if we had a good enough social safety net, wouldn't that create a […]
Is a need for fiscal stimulus a symptom of a poorly-designed social safety net?
In the debates on the need for a fiscal stimulus, both sides generally agreed that this particular policy instrument is one of the clumsiest available to policy makers. The dangers are well-known and well-documented: getting the timing wrong, getting the targets wrong, political interference, the risk of seeing a temporary spending program turn into a […]
Saturday Night Fever: Roger Farmer, multiple natural rates, search theory, and share prices
Roger Farmer is an old grad skool buddy. We were in the same MA and PhD class at UWO in the late 1970's, though we have lost touch a bit over the decades. That's a sort of disclaimer. Roger preferred punk to disco; I think he was right on that score. But Peter Diamond's "A […]
How increasing tuition fees can increase university participation rates
I'm recycling this old post in celebration of Lucien Bouchard's call for an increase in Quebec university tuition fees. The Quebec government has just released a collection of studies on financing education, including this one (121-page pdf, in French) written by Valérie Vierstraete, a professor of economics at the Université de Sherbrooke. It addresses exactly […]
Even more on the ineffectiveness of minimum wages as an anti-poverty measure
As was the case in Ontario, recent evidence from the US illustrates the pointlessness of using the minimum wage as a way to reduce poverty (h/t Craig Newmark): Minimum Wages and Poverty: Will a $9.50 Federal Minimum Wage Really Help the Working Poor? Using data drawn from the March Current Population Survey, we find that […]
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
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