Author Archives: wciecon
Fiscal Policy Shocks
Well, here is a new contribution to the debate over the effect of fiscal policy shocks from the journal of the Institute for Fiscal Studies. The authors Paweł Borys, Piotr Ciżkowicz and Andrzej Rzońca are from the Warsaw School of Economics and look at the impact of fiscal policy shocks on EU new member states. […]
Flogging a Dead Horse III: The weird response of Benjamin Zycher
This post was written by Mike Veall of the Department of Economics at McMaster University. Sorry, I am still on about the research that was used to formulate the Ontario Progressive Conservative jobs plan. Again I emphasize this is about the underlying econometric research by Benjamin Zycher, Senior Fellow of the American Enterprise Institute. It is not […]
Dutch Inequality Theory
Last night I dreamt of Nick van Rowe again. I asked my Dutch ancestor what he thought would happen to the distribution of wealth in the future. According to Dutch Capital Theory, "capital" is just the name we give to land that we have made ourselves in the past. The rent on an acre of […]
The Economic Role of Monarchy
In the wake of the abdication of King Juan Carlos of Spain, the New York Times ran a short piece on monarchies noting that 12 monarchies still survive in Europe with eight of them being liberal democracies – Belgium, Britain, Denmark, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain and Sweden. Incidentally, these Scandinavian monarchies in particular are […]
Teaching general principles of macro
In a couple of hours the Bank of Canada will do what it does eight times a year. It will set a temporary target for the overnight rate of interest. Will it raise it, lower it, or leave it the same? What will its decision depend on? How will its decision affect the Canadian economy? […]
Pre Debate Warmup: Ranking Employment Across Ontario Political Regimes
Well, tonight is the Ontario election debate and inevitably job creation will come up as a topic. On the one hand, Tim Hudak will have to deal with the fallout over his Million Jobs Plan. On the other hand, Kathleen Wynne and Andrea Horwath will need to demonstrate what their plans for employment growth in […]
John Cochrane on Monetary Policy with Interest on Reserves
Central banks are usually owned by governments, and transfer their seigniorage profits to those governments. This creates a link between monetary and fiscal policy. But the presence of that link says nothing about the direction of causation. John Cochrane (pdf) says that central banks' paying interest on reserves allows them to conduct monetary policy independently […]
100% reserves via interest on reserves
Start with a fractional reserve banking system, like Canada's for example. Canadian banks are not required by law to hold any reserves, and choose to hold very little. They hold a small amount of currency, plus a very small amount of deposits at the Bank of Canada. Those deposits pay interest, but that rate of […]
One Million Jobs One More Time
The debate over the Ontario PC “Million Jobs” platform has certainly gone ballistic over the last few days and having posted on the subject in January when the plan was first announced I certainly think its worth another post. When the “Million Jobs” plan was first mentioned in January, my response was to look at […]
Flogging a Dead Horse II: A million jobs anyway?
This post was written by Mike Veall of the Department of Economics at McMaster University. I have been asked by a few people about my statement here that “I would hope that whoever is in charge, whoever wins the election, that eight years from now we would have a million more jobs …I would expect the […]
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
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