Category Inequality
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 […]
Staghunt and (the) IRS
"IRS" stands for "Increasing Returns to Scale". It means if you double all the inputs, you more than double the output. I first worried that US readers might think "IRS" stands for Internal Revenue Service (the US tax people). Then I realised that I want it to stand for that too. Staghunt is a simple […]
The Irrelevance of Universal Basic Income
The Modigliani Miller Theorem says that a firm's financing policy is irrelevant. It's wrong of course, but it's a good place to start thinking about firms' financing policies. It would be presumptuous to talk about an Irrelevance "Theorem" for Basic Income. The math is trivial, and the economics is obvious. (And I hope this is […]
Bargaining power and the incidence of taxes on high earners in Canada
Today I'm presenting a paper at the meetings of the Canadian Economics Association: "Bargaining power and the incidence of taxes on high earners in Canada." The bottom line is that once you take into account the fact that high earners have bargaining power – that's why they are high earners in the first place! – […]
Two Problems with Designing a Basic Income Experiment
WARNING: I don't do (micro) Public Finance. And I don't do experimental economics. Those who have read the literature may tell me they are well aware of these problems, or that I'm wrong about something. Suppose someone asked me to design an experiment to test whether Basic Income would be a Good thing. (They wouldn't […]
Conceptually costing Basic Income
Micro public finance is not my area, so take this post with a big heap of salt. But: Q. How much would it cost to implement a Basic Income, where everyone gets (say) $10,000 per year? The normal way to approach that question is to multiply $10,000 by the population, then subtract the cost of […]
Reforming Government: Do We Need a Human Investment Super-Ministry?
From time to time, I like to ruminate on what could be done to better develop or improve the delivery of government services especially given the tendency of government ministries to overlap when providing services. This gets a further push when I am teaching public finance – as I am this term. There is of […]
A modest proposal for renewed imperialism
I hear that a lot of people want to migrate to…Finland. I'm pretty sure it's not because they like Finland's climate, or scenery. I don't think it's got anything to do with the physical geography of Finland. I think that they want to move to Finland because they like Finland's political, legal, and social institutions, […]
How much revenue will the Liberals generate with a new tax bracket on high earners?
[I started writing this post in May, but I stopped when it looked like the Liberals were not going to be in a position to implement this measure. Happily, I didn't actually delete it.] [An earlier version made a stupid mistake; I did everything under tha assumption that the increase was 3 percentage points, and […]
Problems with the Fraser Institute inequality study
This post was written by Mike Veall of the Department of Economics at McMaster University. Last week the Fraser Institute published a study that one of the co-authors, Christopher Sarlo, summarized in the Globe and Mail (Is the income gap growing? It depends who you measure, Thursday, July 30). This blog expands on my 150 word letter […]
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
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