Category Labour markets
Soldiers of fortune, department chairs, and CEO pay
Assume ten identical young men. One of them is needed to do a dangerous job which creates disutility for the person doing it. Assume they have diminishing marginal utility of consumption. Assume (though a weaker assumption can get the same results) that the utility function is separable in consumption and the type of job. There […]
Does Economic Growth Lower Workplace Absenteeism?
It’s just past the middle of the term and the number of students coming to class seems to have taken a bit of a drop and there seem to be a lot of people off sick. It has also been a particularly gloomy few days in the news with talk of recessions and rumors of […]
How many Canadians are losing and finding jobs?
A couple of weeks ago, I noted that as far as I could make out from available data, rates of job creation returned to pre-recession levels more than a year ago. This time, I'm going to try to get a handle on the gross flows on the other side of the market – that is, in […]
Why do people think that Canadian job creation rates require a policy response?
Pundits and politicians are calling on the government to "do something" about the state of the Canadian labour market; these calls are presumably based on a perception that job growth is still weak. It's not clear upon which data this assessment is based. The data that would be most informative are no longer being collected, […]
The Lucasian map is not the Hayekian territory
In defence of Lucas '72. Take any macroeconomic model of a market economy with inefficient aggregate fluctuations. In fact, take any economic model where something bad might happen. Assume that model is literally true. The people in that model are idiots.
Employment and Political Regimes: Some Ontario Evidence
According to a recent Nanos poll conducted for the Globe and Mail, after health care, the economy/jobs is the top concern of Ontario voters this fall election. Ontario voters may be interested on how employment growth has fared in their particular neck of the woods under various political regimes.
Ranking Employment Performance
It has been the conventional wisdom in Canada that we have weathered the Great Recession and the financial crisis much better than the rest of the world. Ever wonder why when government comparisons are made about how Canada fared during the Great Recession, the comparison made is inevitably with the G-7 countries?
On trends in employment rates in Canada
I drew attention to Statistics Canada's updated projections for demographic trends a few weeks ago; the reason for being concerned about them is that unless worker productivity and/or rates of return on retirement savings increase dramatically, per-capita incomes are likely to fall as 8-12 per cent of the population ages out of the workforce. Of […]
Employment growth in Texas
This post was written by Simon van Norden of HEC-Montréal. In normal times, people could care less about employment growth in Texas. But times are strange enough that our neighbours to the south are suddenly making an issue of it. (It’s even in the New York Times! (1) (2))
Employed vs unemployed wage rigidity
Suppose you believe that (nominal) wage rigidity in the face of a decline in the (nominal) demand curve for labour is what causes unemployment in a recession. Is it wage rigidity of the employed workers or of the unemployed workers that's the problem? Scott Sumner and Alex Tabarrok say it's (mostly) the wage rigidity of […]
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
Recent Comments