Category Labour markets
FIRE! FIRE in the labour market!
The story of the Canadian labour market in the second half of 2011 was a recovery knocked off course by events in international financial markets. The crises associated with the US debt ceiling and European sovereign debt drove down commodity prices and the Canadian dollar. So the fact that employment growth slowed in the wake […]
Why we should be paying more attention to the SEPH employment numbers
The first Friday of every month is Employment Data Day in Canada and the US. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics releases employment data from its Current Population Survey (CPS – the household survey) and its Current Employment Statistics survey (CES – the payroll or establishment survey). For reasons I'll get into later, the establishment […]
Retirement and the non-smoothing of consumption of leisure
Most of us take a short break for coffee, a longer break for lunch, a longer break from late afternoon to the following morning, a longer break at weekends, a longer break for holidays, and then a very long break indeed when we get old. There are two questions: 1. Why do we bunch our […]
The efficiency case for nepotism
A firm wanting to invest in a worker, to train her and give her valuable skills, runs a risk: what if she leaves, and takes her valuable human capital elsewhere? A firm can induce its employees to stay through deferred compensation. It pays new employees less than their productivity merits, and senior employees more. The […]
A Long Term Employment Picture – Go West for Opportunity
Stephen Gordon’s posts on the recent employment performance in Quebec gave me cause to get the numbers on employment growth over the long term on a provincial basis. I obtained the seasonally adjusted Statistics Canada employment numbers and used them to construct average annual growth rates in employment by province for three periods: 2001-2011, 1991-2000 […]
Quebec employment watch: le mystère persiste
The hunt for data that are consistent with the sharp drop in employment reported by the Labour Force Survey in November and December ([1],[2]) continues. Today's release of initial Employment Insurance claims for November don't look like what we'd see in an economy that was seeing a sharp jump in unemployment:
It’s still too early to tell what is going on in the Quebec labour market
I still don't know why – or even if – the Quebec labour market is doing as badly as the numbers I've presented here and in Economy Lab suggest. It turns out that almost all of the bad news comes from two consecutive bad LFS numbers from November and December. As I discussed here, there's a […]
Something is wrong with the Quebec economy
I generally don't pay much attention to the month-to-month changes in the provincial employment numbers, but there's something going on in Quebec.
Real wages during the recession
I've seen a few stories about recent trends in wages, and too many of them seem to be trying to make a big deal out of movements that – when in put in context – are really too small to say much of anything. [Updated in an almost-certainly futile attempt to combat confirmation bias.]
The political economy of nominal wage targeting
WARNING: if you are not a macroeconomist you may not understand this post, even if you think you do. This is especially true if you are not a macroeconomist but think you know something about "political economy". (When I hear the words "political economy" I usually reach for my shovel.*) This post is an experiment. […]
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