Category Econometrics
Never mind the flatness, feel the length (of the observed Phillips Curve)
Sorry. It suddenly came to me this morning: a simple (and now blindingly obvious) way to reconcile an apparent contradiction in my own thoughts. As a lot of people in different countries have noticed, the observed Phillips Curve now looks very flat. Certainly a lot flatter than it did in the past. And I've been […]
Statistics Canada’s historical housing cost data is wrong
In the early 1960s, Canadian economic historian Marvin McInnis started digging through the Dominion Bureau of Statistics archives, looking for city-level information on rental prices. While there, he discovered something strange and disturbing: A prominent theme of my career has been to reveal anomalies in what has been put forward as evidence. One instance is known only to me. […]
Another Foray into Data: New Macro-Financial Data
I think Stephen Gordon's Project Link and its piecing together of fragments of Statistics Canada data is a solid step in the right direction. If our national statistical agency is not going to provide long-term consistent data series, then I suppose its up to the researchers to lead the way. Another case in point is […]
Do “Monetary Shocks” matter much?
The central bank is on the Gold Standard. The discovery of new gold increases the supply of gold, which causes an inflationary boom. People blame the inflationary boom on the gold discoveries. It can't have been a monetary shock, because the central bank wasn't doing anything different from what it always does. The central bank […]
External validity, fallacies of composition, and the Wawa multiplier
The Canadian government decides to run an experiment to see if fiscal policy works. It throws 100 darts at a map of Canada. One dart lands on Wawa Ontario, so it spends an extra $1 million in Wawa. Local GDP in Wawa, and local GDP in all the other 99 places where the darts land, […]
Is it ethical to sell complimentary copies of textbooks?
Faculty Books Recycling is a company that takes the complimentary copies of textbooks that publishers send professors, resells those comp copies to students, and makes a profit on the transaction. Faculty Books does everything possible to make professors feel that selling – or giving away – comp copies is an ethical thing to do. In […]
Another rant about Statistics Canada’s Attention Deficit Disorder
I've done this before, but I've had a very bad day and I need to vent. I've started work on a forecasting project for the Canadian data, focusing on the short- and medium-term outlook. The first task is to see what sort of data are available, and once again, the frustrating answer is 'not near […]
Econometric estimates of fiscal policy multipliers
New Keynesian macroeconomics says that a (temporary) increase in government spending will cause an increase in the natural real interest rate. And unless the central bank increases the actual real interest rate by an equal amount, the result will be an increase in Aggregate Demand, which will cause an increase in real output and/or inflation. […]
Ontario and Its Neighbours
I suppose I have become somewhat obsessed with Ontario’s economy and its performance but here I go again with a few comparisons. Ontario is strategically located on the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence waterway adjacent to the huge population of the US northeast. Its neighbours are trade partners and markets as well as economic competitors. How does […]
VAR vs WTF!?
Vector auto regressions (VARs) are supposed to tell us how the economy would respond over time if hit by a shock, by looking at past patterns of responses to shocks. A "shock" means "a deviation of one of the variables in the VAR from the level that was forecast by the VAR". And "shocks" include […]
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