Author Archives: wciecon
The social spending and GDP per capita graph redux
For reasons unknown to me or to Mark Thoma, The Economist blogger doesn’t seem to be willing to engage me directly in the interpretation of the following graph from this post: My original comment on this graph was: ‘These are countries whose per-capita incomes are greater than the OECD average. The point here is that […]
Doing it by the (text)book: The Nordic approach to financing the welfare state
These are the slides I prepared for the session on ‘Taxation and Social Democracy‘, organised by the Progressive Economics Forum at the Canadian Economics Association meetings; the invitation was based on my blog posts on the nordic model. One of the things that distinguishes blogging from research is that although academia frowns on recycling ideas, […]
Corporate profits are not driving the increase in the top-fractile income shares. So how would higher corporate taxes reduce inequality?
Jason Furman, guest-blogging at Free Exchange, advocates higher corporate taxes. He gets at least two important things wrong: He seems to think that corporate taxes will be entirely paid by owners of capital. It’s more likely that investors will bear approximately none of the tax. He suggests that corporate taxes will help slow the growth […]
Why focus on progressive taxes and not on progressive transfers?
Many posts in the economics blogosphere on the subject of progressive taxation today: Greg Mankiw discusses this paper, Mark Thoma points us to a WSJ article, and Brad DeLong links to Mark’s post twice (here and here). Inequality – both its level and the rate at which it has been increasing in Canada and the […]
Yes, the Bank of Canada will increase interest rates in July
Bank Governor David Dodge gave a speech today, and repeated the warnings of higher interest rates ahead: [S]ince April, we have seen two things: an increased risk of future inflation and a rise in the Canadian dollar that appears to have been stronger than historical experience would have suggested. At our last fixed announcement date, […]
Looking back on the expansion: This time, it’s different
The 2007Q1 national accounts numbers were released last week, and it looks like we have indeed dodged that slowdown we were worrying about last fall. And a good thing, too: compared to the 1982-90 and 1991-01 expansions, this current run has some very nice features. This is one of those long, data-oriented posts with lots […]
The Bank of Canada should raise interest rates tomorrow, but it probably won’t
The Bank of Canada hasn’t changed its target for the overnight rate since May 24, 2006 – seven consecutive decisions to not change the target have followed. But there are several reasons to think that the time has come for this streak to end: Core inflation has been steadily drifting up over the past few […]
Homogamy, inequality and social mobility
A couple of recent studies by Statistics Canada on the phenomenon of ‘assortive marriage’ have generated some comment. The point is easy enough to explain and it’s not really hard to understand: Changing role of education in the marriage market in Canada and the United States: …54% of Canadian young couples had the same educational […]
Results from a natural experiment: Economists are different
Last year, in my report on the inner workings of the adjudication process for research funding applications at the Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), I made the following complaint: For some reason that has never been clearly explained to me – and I’ve done this twice – SSHRC insists on a fixed ‘success […]
From Ghawar to Athabaska
Jim Hamilton points us to Stuart Staniford’s analysis of the decline in oil production in Saudi Arabia’s most important oil field: After Stuart’s monumental research, I really think the burden of proof is on those who claim that Saudi Arabian production can continue to increase. At this point, we need not the conclusions of experts […]
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
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