Category Labour markets
Earnings in the “Good Old Days”
The last two times I’ve taught my quantitative economic history course, I have assigned a micro-data collection project based on the 1901 Census of Canada. All in all, this data collection was a good experience for the students given they got some direct experience collecting primary data, coding it and then analyzing it. Moreover, I […]
Minimum Wages as Macroeconomic Stimulus?
The minimum wage debate has heated up in Ontario given the Ontario Ministry of Labor’s Minimum Wage Advisory Panel is travelling the province looking for input on how to adjust the minimum wage in the province and sparking debate as to whether the minimum wage should be raised from the current general minimum of $10.25 […]
Shifting Populations, Shifting Economies
Statistics Canada just released its total population estimates for 2013 and the picture shows declining shares of population not just for Quebec and the Atlantic region, but also for parts of the west. While the population share of the western provinces has grown over the period 1983 to 2013, this increase is due to Alberta […]
Real wages and old-time macroeconomics
I posted this graph at Maclean's earlier today: The hook of the piece was that Canadian real wages had increased in Canada, and I made the point that this increase was largely due to the Bank of Canada's undershooting its inflation target. I went to the FRED site and put together a similar graph, using […]
What is the link between unionisation and inequality?
I've looked at graphs like this many times over the past few years: One of the things that I notice in that chart is that countries that are reputed to have strong union movements have market inequality outcomes that don't appear to be all that much better than those with weaker union movements. So this […]
Visible minorities: Distinctly Canadian
As far as I know, Canada is the only country that divides its population into "visible minorities" and "non-visible minorities." In this post, I describe how, and why, Canada counts people this way. A person's visible minority status is ascertained by asking: "Is this person….White, South Asian (e.g., East Indian, Pakistani, Sri Lankan, etc.), Chinese, Black, […]
The Challenges of Mark Carney’s European “Mission Civilisatrice”
In his farewell address to Canada before assuming the reins of the Bank of England, Mark Carney argues that Canada works because of the strength of the Canadian federation when it comes to its institutional framework and its four critical advantages of responsible fiscal policy, sound monetary policy, a single and resilient financial system and […]
The (slowly) changing face of Ontario economics departments
When I was an undergraduate, many of my professors were Canadian born and American trained. The demographic profile of Canada, and of Canadian economics classrooms, has changed since then, as our country has recruited high skilled immigrants from around the world. But has there been a corresponding change in the demographic composition of the professoriate? As […]
Boys, retention, and multiple regression
A followup to my previous post on university retention and males. Assume boys and girls are identical, except: there's something in the water at high schools that causes boys to do worse than girls; and there's something in the water at universities that causes boys to do worse than girls. Suppose you had a data […]
The intercept is negotiable, the slope is fixed
A new hire only gets one chance to negotiate: a brief window between the time that an offer is made and the time when that offer is accepted. Those initial terms and conditions determine the employee's salary for years to come – possibly the entire the duration of his or her time at the institution. […]
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
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