Category Econometrics
No, Atlanta and St Louis Feds, you can’t test whether core is useful that way
This is frustrating me. People (e.g. the Atlanta Fed Macroblog, the St Louis Fed Economic Synopses (pdf)) still aren't getting it. What can I do to attract attention to my simple point? Think up some totally insulting inflammatory blog post title? Nope, that's not really me. I'm just going to try again. And use bold. […]
Is core inflation an artefact?
Headline inflation (total CPI inflation) has been above core inflation since last June. That's for Canada, but it's roughly the same in most other countries too. Most central banks, and most economists, pay more attention to core inflation than total inflation as an indicator of underlying inflationary pressures. Core inflation has inertia, and so is […]
A preliminary estimate for Canadian 2011Q1 GDP growth
Statistics Canada released their estimates for monthly GDP growth in February: a decline of 0.2%. This is a disappointing number, but when combined with the strong January number and the increase in hours worked in March, my toy backcaster that uses the first two months' GDP data and the employment numbers in the third month […]
Don’t eat the marshmallow
"Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery" – Mr. Micawber in Charles Dickens' "David Copperfield" Canadians are increasingly indebted. 31% of us struggle to make our bills and payments. We're pretty clueless when it comes to retirement – just 40% […]
Statistics Canada under siege
If there's one thing that has prevented me from despairing completely about the débâcle that is and will be the 2011 census, it's been my faith in the professionalism and expertise of the people who work at Statistics Canada. Their present political masters may be deaf to reason, but this is only a temporary state […]
A preliminary estimate for Canadian 2010Q4 GDP growth
Statistics Canada released their estimates for November GDP gowth on Monday, and it was relatively good news: an increase of 4.4% at annual rates. But we shouldn't get to excited. According to the small backcasting (no, I did not make that word up) model I've been using for the past few years, the 2010Q4 number […]
How economic policy analysis is done, and why it’s not the same as forecasting
Third-year students in Laval's Baccalauréat intégré en économie et politique are required to take a seminar course on policy evaluation, and this week, I'm going to be giving a lecture on the basics of how it's done. It occurs to me that this is a lecture that many, many people should sit in on, so […]
Why Statistics Canada oversamples Newfoundland
When playing around with some data the other day, I noticed something odd. I was trying to figure out where my respondents lived, so I typed "tab PROV" and was surprised to see that about four percent lived in Newfoundland. That's the number in the distribution of respondents column in the table below. Distribution of […]
Relative grade inflation, and Operation Birdhunt
Relative grade inflation is when one professor grades easier than another professor. Or when one department grades easier than another department. Operation Birdhunt was my attempt (OK, my colleague Marcel-Cristian Voia did the actual work) to do an econometric study of relative grade inflation across departments. Birdhunt was a failure, but a noble failure.
A preliminary estimate for Canadian 2010Q3 GDP growth
The August 2010 GDP numbers have been released (increase of 0.3% over July), so It's time once again to update my series of posts (most recent: 2010Q2) in which I try to take the GDP numbers from the first two months of a given quarter, mix them with the LFS numbers from the third month, […]
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
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