Category General
The NHL’s real problem: bad cost-benefit analyses
It turns out that Don Cherry was right all along – too many Europeans play in the NHL: IIHF study backs up Cherry’s beliefs: The IIHF study found that the majority of Europeans drafted by National Hockey League clubs between 2000 and 2006 did not make an impact either at the professional or minor-pro level. […]
A new US policy for dealing with population growth?
US teacher exiled to Canada after sexual abuse conviction Now, we in Canada make it a point to not mimic American traditions whenever possible. For example, we don’t have a Statue of Liberty. But if we did, I’m pretty sure that it wouldn’t read "Give us your poor, your tired, your convicted sex offenders…" And […]
Nonsensical nonpigovianism
In which the National Post’s Terence Corcoran crawls out on a limb and starts hacking it off behind him: We open with his ‘Join the nopigou club‘ column, in reaction to Greg Mankiw’s campaign for higher gasoline taxes in the US. This column is greeted with a rather laconic reply from Mankiw, and a certain […]
Economists as politicians
André Boisclair made his début as the leader of the opposition Parti Québécois in the Quebec legislature yesterday, and it occurred to me that both opposition parties in Quebec now have leaders with at least some sort of training in economics: Mario Dumont of the ADQ has a BA from Concordia, and André Boisclair was […]
A puzzling proxy from The Economist
From The Economist: [R]eal interest rates should be roughly the same as the trend rate of GDP growth (a proxy for the return on capital). This isn’t the first time I’ve seen this statement used there, and I once even wrote a letter asking about it. I’ve tried playing around with several expressions that describe […]
Average cost pricing at Statistics Canada
When I was a graduate student, I was given to understand that the reason why so many Canadian economists worked with American data was that US-based journals weren’t interested in publishing work done using non-US data. This impression was of course completely wrong. If anything, US journals (and their referees!) seem to have a prejudice […]
Why would unions oppose a basic income?
The Berkeley Electronic Press has a new journal: Basic Income Studies. The Basic Income – also known as the Guaranteed Annual Income (GAI) in Canada – is a proposal that I’m very much favourably disposed to, even though I’m not familiar with all of the technical details. I took a look at its inaugural issue, […]
Four new AEA journals
From an e-mail I just received: Following a three-year study and discussion of the subject, the Ad Hoc Committee on Journals (Robert Hall [chair], Judith Chevalier, David Colander, Peter Diamond, Alan Krueger, and Daniel Rubinfeld) recommended to the Executive Committee in April 2006 that the Association start four aggregated field journals, each published in four […]
The new Governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia and I have something in common
We both did our MA at the University of Western Ontario during the academic year 1984-85. I’m pretty sure that Glenn Stevens was the best student of our cohort (I think I was second), and I remember him telling me that UWO tried very hard to persuade him to stay on to do a PhD. […]
A new Canadian economics blog
A new blog popped up while I’ve been on vacation: true dough, written by a prolific (averaging about 2 posts a day!), anonymous (so far) woman who is a welcome addition to the still-way-too-small club of Canadian economics bloggers.
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
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