Category Family
Marriage, Canadian style
Canadians are less inclined towards marriage than Americans. How much less?
The Historical Constants of Affluence
According to the recently released results of the National Household Survey, the top 1% of Canadians aged 15 and over earn $191,000 a year and tend to be predominantly male, university educated, married, most likely over the age of 45, and live in larger metropolitan centers. It would appear that little has changed since the […]
Can IKEA Stay Profitable?
As part of moving my daughter into her new abode last week, I had an experience with IKEA, which got me thinking about whether the giant furniture retailer can continue its high growth and profitability. Everyone is of course familiar with the basic approach used by this very successful company. IKEA provides innovative, stylish low […]
Love, paternalism, selfishness – and money.
Smokers smoke. Gamblers gamble. Drinkers drink. Why should anyone else care? Some non-economists believe that economics assumes selfishness. Each person is only concerned about themselves, and their material consumption. Selfishness can be represented formally like this: u=u(x) (1) A person's "utility", their well-being or happiness, is a function, u, of their consumption of goods and […]
Taxation of the family: everything old is new again
Matt Krzepkowski and Jack Mintz have recently produced a working paper titled "No More Second-Class Taxpayers: How Income Splitting Can Bring Fairness to Canada's Single-Income Families." The paper argues that higher income single-earner married couples are "disadvantaged by the current system." It proposes to put an end to that by allowing income splitting, so a […]
What’s a man worth on the dating market?
Last fall I stopped talking about the economics of gender, and began talking about the economics of sex. It was wonderful. So much can be discussed under the rubric of economics of sex. Take, for example, the pick-up artist phenomenon, described in books like The Game. It's like Cesar Millan's Dog Whisperer books, urging men to be alphas, take […]
How can son preference persist?
In much of North Eastern India, there are 915 or fewer girls for every thousand boys – a sex ratio of more than 1.09 boys per girl. The persistence of such high sex ratios is puzzling, because it violates Fisher's Principle. In most species, the ratio of males to females is approximately one to one. […]
Who is the caregiver?
In the picture on the right, who is the caregiver, the man or the woman? (To find out the answer, click "Continue reading…").
Births Revisited: Births, Population and Per Capita Income
Well, after my last post I finally got around to calculating another measure of the birth rate – births per capita. Total births are a useful aggregate but the measure does not adjust for population size. There are other fertility measures out there such as births per woman aged 15 to 44 years but per […]
Recessions and Making Babies
It would appear that the severity of the global recession is affecting fertility rates in many countries. The fertility rate as measured by the number of live births per woman in Europe has dropped substantially in a number of countries according to The Economist. These results suggest that rather than lowering the opportunity cost of […]
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
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