Author Archives: wciecon
The Globe and Mail scores another meaningless scoop
A worrisome trend at the national paper of record: first this, and now yet another pointless article congratulating itself for making use of the Access to Information Act to get information that was already well-known, but apparently not well-understood: Ottawa urged to push foreign takeovers; Outside investment has a ‘net benefit,’ internal files suggest:Federal officials […]
Canada already has a flat tax
I suspect that the typical Canadian – and this includes economists – has the impression that the tax system in Canada is progressive. Maybe too progressive, or not progressive enough according to their taste, but progressive. It turns out that this isn’t the case. According to this paper (pdf), the most recent study that tries […]
Why oh why, etc: Canadian edition
In which the Canadian business press goes out of its way to track down a meaningless piece of information, and interprets it in the worst possible way (h/t to true dough) : Bloomberg: Canadian Dollar Still Undervalued After Rally, Memorandum Says: The Canadian dollar is undervalued and doesn’t yet reflect the benefit to the country’s […]
Four new AEA journals
From an e-mail I just received: Following a three-year study and discussion of the subject, the Ad Hoc Committee on Journals (Robert Hall [chair], Judith Chevalier, David Colander, Peter Diamond, Alan Krueger, and Daniel Rubinfeld) recommended to the Executive Committee in April 2006 that the Association start four aggregated field journals, each published in four […]
The Fed faces a tricky rebound
Although the Bank of Canada and the Fed have both chosen to stop increasing interest rates, they did so for very different reasons. When the Bank of Canada called a halt to interest rate increases last month, it did so because it thought it had hit the sweet spot – inflation on target, output at […]
The new Governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia and I have something in common
We both did our MA at the University of Western Ontario during the academic year 1984-85. I’m pretty sure that Glenn Stevens was the best student of our cohort (I think I was second), and I remember him telling me that UWO tried very hard to persuade him to stay on to do a PhD. […]
A new Canadian economics blog
A new blog popped up while I’ve been on vacation: true dough, written by a prolific (averaging about 2 posts a day!), anonymous (so far) woman who is a welcome addition to the still-way-too-small club of Canadian economics bloggers.
The Bank of Canada will not raise interest rates tomorrow
When the Bank raised the overnight rate target by 25 basis points to 4.25% on May 24, it seemed to be for the last time (after seven such raises since last September), barring a significant change in the data: BoC Press release: …[T]he target for the overnight rate is now at a level that is […]
Social choice and optimal inference
One of the highlights of my graduate school years was the lecture where I learned about Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem. It’s hard to imagine an question more important to the social sciences that the social choice problem: how can we aggregate individual preferences into a coherent social order? Arrow’s answer is that we can’t, but that […]
Canada’s dark anti-matter
The IMF released its annual report on the Canadian economy the other day. Nothing very much to report, which is understandable: the economy is operating at capacity, inflation is low and stable, and the government has been running a surplus for almost a decade now. There was an interesting tidbit in their forecasts: thanks to […]
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
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