Category Labour markets
If you wanna run hot you gotta run steady
Canadian economist Richard Lipsey would always insist that the Phillips Curve is a curve, and not a straight line. Maybe because wages and prices are stickier down than up. Or maybe because unemployment can't go below 0%. Or both. Here's why that matters for macroeconomic policy: Suppose the central bank wants 2% inflation on average, […]
More Thoughts on a Better Income Support System for the Next Crisis
This post was written by Mike Veall of the Department of Economics at McMaster University. I appreciated the comments on my earlier post, where I suggested that a small monthly Basic Income system would have the advantage of being able to be scaled-up in a crisis. Incenting participation in the tax/transfer system is responsive to […]
A Small Basic Income as a Solution to the Magic List Problem
This post was written by Mike Veall of the Department of Economics at McMaster University. What if in a future crisis there is again a need to distribute money? As Jennifer Robson put it, “government doesn’t have a magic list with everybody’s name and addresses and bank accounts.” I was reminded of this when thinking […]
Boiling Frogs – Slow Recoveries are Deep Recoveries, with Flatter Phillips Curves
Andy Harless' tweet (about the US economy) got me thinking. "There’s a frog-boiling aspect to this economy. The consistent lack of *rapid* improvement throughout the recovery is enabling us to reach levels of employment that might not otherwise have been attainable." It reminds me of my old post "Short Run 'Speed Limits' on recovery". The […]
Do Chinese Canadians struggle in the labour market?
Update: A revised version of the paper discussed in this blog, with results close to those obtained using the PUMF, is available here. Thanks to Feng Hou for taking my concerns seriously and responding to them promptly.
Hopefully, Tomorrow Won’t Be Yesterday
A short quick post. Yesterday’s job numbers for Canada were greeted with surprise. With 55,900 jobs added in February, the sentiment as best summarized by Doug Porter, Chief Economist with BMO Capital Markets is that: “The economy clearly is not falling off a cliff by any means, arguably quite the opposite”. This is despite what […]
“Are we at full employment yet?”
I vaguely remember having seen this movie before, the earlier British version. And it's a frustrating movie to watch, because nobody knows where full employment is, except maybe when we've driven past it and can see it in the rear-view mirror. And the question itself always gets confused between asking where full employment ought to […]
Has Canada’s female employment rate maxed out?
In their 2018 Budget, the Liberal government committed to increased full-time employment of women as part of its gender equality agenda. Is that goal attainable? The employment rate of women in Canada increased steadily from 1976 up until the 2008 financial crisis. Since that time, the percentage of women over 25 who are employed has been […]
Are education attainment levels the root cause of all good earnings news?
An earlier post noted that the real earnings gains over the past 20 years were as clean an example of a composition effect as you're likely to see. Earnings among full-time workers with a given level of education have shown some modest growth over time, but average earnings growth for all full-time workers has been […]
The Meaning of Life, Labour Supply, and all that
Here are the results of my Twitter poll: This post is my interpretation of those results. I recognise all the usual caveats. I am more concerned about bias in the sampling method than in the small size of the sample (because it's not that small). The people who follow me on Twitter (or who follow […]
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