Category Frances Woolley
Could you pass a 1950s Econ 1000 exam?
Principles of economics final exams set out, implicitly, the core of the discipline. Their questions are designed to test understanding of fundamental economics concepts; the ideas that are the foundation of economic analysis. So when I came across Clifford L. James's Principles of Economics (first published in 1934; ninth edition in 1956), complete with final […]
Is the war over higher education spreading north?
In the US, higher education has become a partisan issue. While Democrats view colleges and universities as having a positive effect on the way things are going in the country, a majority of Republicans now view colleges and universities as a negative influence (see this Pew survey). There is also a partisan divide in the US […]
Why don’t more economics students get SSHRC doctoral fellowships?
In 2017*, just seven economics PhD students were awarded SSHRC doctoral fellowships, according to data provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) to the Canadian Economics Association. Put another way, only 1.6 percent of the 430 new SSHRC doctoral fellowships awarded that year went to students studying economics. The immediate cause of […]
The gendered impact of eliminating mandatory retirement
On March 6th, the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario released a report on the sustainability of university expenditures. One of the issues highlighted in the report was financial cost of eliminating standard retirement at age 65. As Simona Chiose reported in the Globe, Ontario professors "who are 66 and older have an average salary […]
Making guns obsolete
The US supposedly has a unique gun culture. Yet, for an economist, culture is a lousy explanation. We seek the origins of culture; the economic and social forces promoting and sustaining it. Hunting, frontier living, and war can explain how the US gun culture got started, but not its persistence. Gun-friendly rural areas are losing […]
Overselling faded dreams?
The April, 2017, issue of Science has a paper by Chetty, Grusky, Hell, Hendren, Manduca, and Narang on "The Fading American Dream" (ungated here). The paper documents falling income mobility. In particular, Chetty et al claim that, "the fraction of children earning more than their parents fell from 92% in the 1940 birth cohort to […]
Where did all the immigrants go? A fascinating puzzle with a mundane solution.
There are two ways of finding out how many immigrants there are in Canada. One is through administrative data, that is, by using landing records (the forms filled in when new immigrants arrive in Canada) to track immigrants. Another through survey data: to carry out a survey of a selected sample of the Canadian population, […]
Add dentists to Millennials’ list of victims
Diamonds. Napkins. Marriage. Relationships. Fashion. All are being killed by Millennials. Now it's the dental industry's turn. Millennials don't visit the dentist – at least not at the rates that their sweet and adorable younger siblings do, or at the rate of their responsible and sensible parents. Now some Millennial reading this might start whining […]
Quebec is a distinct society, parental leave edition
My colleague Jennifer Robson has recently published a study on parental leave for the Institute for Research on Public Policy. It provides a detailed comparison of parental leave in Quebec and the rest of Canada (ROC), and provides a number of recommendations for changing the way that parental leaves are delivered through Canada' Employment Insurance system. As […]
Five things that can help you get your conference submission accepted
Over the past few months, I've been putting together the program for the upcoming Canadian Economics Association meetings: http://economics.ca/2017/en/. It's a reasonable sized conference – this year we had almost 900 submissions – and quite a few papers were rejected. Yet often papers were not accepted for conference program simply because the author made an easily […]
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
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