Category Labour markets
The Growth of the Local Public Sector
The rising expense of local government services is increasingly capturing the attention of pundits and policy makers alike. The rising cost of policing and fire services in particular and their effects on local budgets and ratepayers, has drawn the attention of Canadian municipal leaders. What is also interesting is the overall growth in local government […]
A Resource Bust and Yet…
The OECD has cut its growth forecast for Canada citing the drop in oil and commodity prices. With all the talk about the slowdown in the Canadian economy picking up steam and slow growth as a result of the drop in oil prices that began last spring, one might expect some job losses to start […]
Lump of Labour, Say’s Law, and the slope of the AD curve
I wrote this partly for Sandwichman, and mostly I wrote it because this same question crops up time and time again. It's a very old question, but it always looks like a new question if the technology is new enough. People in caves were probably arguing about whether 3-D printing robots flints would cause mass […]
“Involuntary” unemployment as worsening trade-off
This is what I think an increase in "involuntary" unemployment looks like:
“Human Capital” and “Land Capital”
Branko Milanovic (HT Mark Thoma) misses the point about the usefulness of the concept "human capital". To explain the point, let me talk about "land capital" instead. Raw land, in it's natural state, often isn't very productive. Before you can grow wheat on it, you usually need to clear it, or drain it, or fertilise […]
Comparing Manufacturing Employment Growth: Canada and the USA
According to the employment numbers just released, the United States is doing quite well with the preliminary Bureau of Labour Statistics numbers pointing to the addition of 252,000 jobs in December and an unemployment rate now at 5.6 percent. Meanwhile, Canada exhibited a much weaker performance with Statistics Canada reporting that Canada lost 4,300 jobs […]
How to test whether the LMI (LMCI) is a good indicator
The Bank of Canada calls theirs the "Labour Market Indicator". I now learn from Tim Duy (HT Mark Thoma) that the US Fed has one too, and calls theirs the "Labor Market Conditions Index". I think that LMI and LMCI are roughly the same sort of thing. It's an index number that is supposed to […]
Are stagnant incomes a statistical artifact?
The American middle class hasn't got a raise in 15 years. Median household incomes aren't moving. Canadian numbers tell a similar story. The market income (earnings, private pensions, investment income) of the median Canadian household is lower now, in real terms, than it was in 1976:
Labour market slack in Canada and the US
Paul Krugman says: "My guess is that there’s considerably more slack [in the US labour market] than the unemployment number might lead you to suspect, but the truth is that I don’t know." Timothy Lane, deputy governor Bank of Canada, has an estimate that agrees with Paul's guess. He says (in a talk at Carleton […]
How big has the effect of increases in the minimum wage been on youth employment?
One of the more puzzling features of the Canadian labour market in the last few years recovery has been the stubborn refusal of youth employment rates to recover from the recession: There may a relatively simple (partial) explanation. This is taken from a recent Statistics Canada study on trends in the minimum wage: There seems […]
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