Author Archives: wciecon
Beware the clever theorist
Jim Markusen betrays our deepest, darkest secret to The Economist: "I am confident that I can concoct a model to generate any result desired by a reader with a deep pocketbook."
We can’t get to Kyoto from here, and there’s no point in pretending that we can
All of the opposition parties in Ottawa say that they support the Kyoto accord, and they insist that any climate change policy must be aimed at achieving the Kyoto targets for greenhouse gas emissions. But this is simply not going to happen. There is no feasible way we can achieve the Kyoto targets.
Electric boondoggle du jour
Last month, the government of Quebec and Alcan cobbled together a deal in which Alcan agreed to invest $2b in order to build a new aluminum smelter in the Saquenay-Lac St Jean region; the selling point was the creation of 740 jobs. The Quebec government’s contribution: A $400m interest-free loan over 30 years. $112m in […]
Why does Luxembourg have such high levels of greenhouse gas emissions?
I don’t understand this at all. Tonnnes of CO2 equivalents per person in 1990: Luxembourg: 35.5 Australia: 25.7 US: 23.8 Canada: 21.5 In 2003: Australia: 26.1 Luxembourg: 24.9 Canada: 23.9 US: 23.4 I can understand why Canada, Australia and the US are in the top four. But Luxembourg?
The politics of climate change policy in Canada
Convincing Canadians of the need to make significant sacrifices in order to slow global warming was never going to be easy.
The Canadian Wheat Board: Won’t anybody think of the consumers?
The Canadian Wheat Board – a cartel for Canadian wheat producers – is experiencing the sort of troubles that all cartels have to deal with at some point or another: some of its members believe that they could do better on their own. We’ve all seen this story before, but a distinguishing feature of this […]
How a not-completely-stupid idea became a multi-billion-dollar policy mistake
Another step in the long, slow, agonising death of a white elephant: the federal government is selling land it had expropriated for the Mirabel airport back to its original owners. If you have the benefit of thirty years’ worth of hindsight, the Mirabel airport is a pretty easy project to mock: it made many of […]
Welfare costs of the business cycle and the equity premium
In many ways, Robert Lucas’ famous estimate of the welfare costs of the business cycle is a restatement of the equity premium puzzle. If you take a standard model in which consumer preferences are time-separable, iso-elastic and have ‘plausible’ levels of risk aversion, then the fluctuations in marginal utility associated with unanticipated movements in consumption […]
How much should politicians be paid? And who should pay them?
The proposal to increase Ontario MPP’s pay has elicited the usual flurry of indignation: "It’s remarkable that they would have the chutzpah, the nerve, I mean gonads the size of a canal horse, to introduce legislation like this…" Whenever politicians try to vote themselves a pay increase, a certain amount of scepticism is warranted. But […]
Labour market flexibility and interprovincial migration
The most important development in the Canadian economy over the past 5 years has been the 40% appreciation of the CAD-USD exchange rate since January 2002, largely due to the increase in the price of oil and other commodities. The effects have been predictable: booms in the mining and oil sectors, and hard times for […]
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
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