Category Labour markets
ZMP workers and output quotas
Imagine, just imagine, that the government put a quota on the total output of, say, cars. Because some rabid environmentalists told them to. The result would be a drop in employment of auto workers. Some of those workers, who had skills useful in other sectors, would be able to find jobs elsewhere. Others, who had […]
An unintended consequence of minimum wages?
I have a theory. Employers offer a wage consisting of monetary compensation plus non-monetary benefits. Non-monetary benefits include, for example, free or discounted coffee, flexible work hours, breaks, a safe working environment, and so on. They choose the combination of monetary and non-monetary compensation that allows them to hire the required workforce at the minimum […]
Population aging and labour’s share of income
There aren't many statistical regularities in macroeconomics, and very few of them are as important as the apparent long-term stability of the shares of income that go to capital and labour. This 'stylized fact' was first noted by Nicholas Kaldor back in 1957, and his list of stylized facts shows up in every macroeconomics sequence. […]
A short history of population aging in Canada
I'm still playing around with demographic data, and one thing I've done is trace out a timeline of how we ended up having the population aging problem in the first place. I even prepared an animated gif file: a WCI first.
Population aging has begun in earnest
Last year, I blogged about the demographic projections that Statistics Canada had prepared in 2005, and I noted that data post-2005 were tracking the lower bound for the working-age share of the population. They've since released another set of projections starting in 2010, and things don't look any better. The sharp rise in the retirement-age […]
Real wages, the recession that was, and the recession that wasn’t
After the tech bubble burst, the United States went into recession, but Canada did not. This isn't to say that we escaped entirely unscathed; there were some nervous moments, and the Bank of Canada saw fit to reduce its overnight rate target from 5.75% to 2.25% between January and November 2001. But if you look […]
Excess supply, excess demand, and search
Take a simple supply and demand model of a competitive market. Look at the blue lines in my picture below:
Is it wrong to keep working?
Older university professors earn more than younger ones - this paper has Canadian evidence and references. Studies of scientists and of Norwegian academics have found that research productivity begins to fall at some point, but the onset and rate of decline varies across disciplines. One more recent study found that age and publication productivity were unrelated. Studies (here and here) that track professors' student evaluations over […]
Why New Keynesian macroeconomists are against labour unions
Like all New Keynesians, I believe two things that are apparently contradictory: 1. We each get paid too much; 2. Because of 1, we all get paid too little. It only makes sense if you understand fallacies of composition. What is true of each part isn't necessarily true of the whole.
Reconciling the Minimum Wage Literature
I'm a health and fitness nut, so I read a lot of health studies as well as using my own body as a guinea pig. I've discovered a lot of things – for instance, I don't know if using creatine monohydrate leads to more strength gains than using a placebo, but I do know it makes you […]
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
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