Category Frances Woolley
PhD Vouchers
Canadian universities have strong incentives to create PhD programs, and admit students into those programs. This is because provincial governments typically provide generous funds for each PhD student a university takes in. Also, PhD students are useful and cheap workers. Moreover, having a PhD program raises an academic unit's status, by signalling that it is a "research" […]
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. […]
Milk is mind-bogglingly cheap.
The Canadian Cook Book was first published in 1923. My copy is the twentieth edition, published in 1949. It dates from the heyday of home economics, a time when scientific principles were being applied to domestic life. Recipes are mixed in with nutritional information, guidance on the finer points of etiquette, and what we could […]
Should professors tell students exactly what they expect?
Imagine, for a moment, that students acquire valuable human capital during their time at university. Imagine that the grades on a student's transcript reflect his or her level of human capital. Imagine that, every term, a professor uses examinations, term papers, and other assignments, to measure how much human capital each student has acquired over the […]
Econoblogging – still a Worthwhile Canadian Initiative?
This Friday I will be joining colleagues in international affairs, journalism, public policy and political science to talk about "Academics in the Media Landscape: The Role of Scholar-Columnist-Bloggers". The panel is part of Carleton's Visions for Canada, 2042 conference, which explores "the ways innovative collaboration among researchers and the community may be the most effective response to […]
Economists making spectacularly bad forecasts, 1961 edition.
Back in the 1960s, the Ontario government's Department of Economics dutifully cranked out annual population forecasts. What is remarkable about these forecasts is how far wrong they were. The economists completely failed to predict the demographic changes that were about to hit Ontario. Here are the 1961 projections side by side with the actual 1976 population […]
The Mary Tyler Moore Effect
In 1970, every Justice on the Supreme Court of Canada was male. Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau had an all-male cabinet. Canada had never had a female premier – or even a female television newsreader. Little girls across the country were starting to feel the faint stirrings of ambition, often encouraged by mothers who wanted […]
How to write an email that will get you what you want
Most of my day-to-day social and professional interactions take place over email. It's my primary form of direct, one-on-one contact with students, colleagues, and co-authors. Consequently, my impressions of people are shaped by their emails. Are their emails polite or demanding? Clear or confusing? For good or ill, I judge people by the emails they send. Based on my own […]
Tony
Tony Atkinson died January 1, 2017. He was my PhD supervisor when I was at LSE in the 1980s, and we kept in touch occasionally afterwards. What follows are some personal reflections on his life and his work. In his youth, Tony hitchhiked around Europe. In his later years, he would give lifts to Oxford students thumbing their […]
Economists don’t get SSHRC money, grad student edition
The other day a colleague was explaining how SSHRC-funded Canada Graduate Scholarships are awarded at my university. "It's mostly driven by GPA," he said. "Grades in economics are so low that your students don't get a look in." I spent some time messing around with the SSHRC awards engine. His suspicion that relatively few Canada […]
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
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