Category Livio Di Matteo
Can IKEA Stay Profitable?
As part of moving my daughter into her new abode last week, I had an experience with IKEA, which got me thinking about whether the giant furniture retailer can continue its high growth and profitability. Everyone is of course familiar with the basic approach used by this very successful company. IKEA provides innovative, stylish low […]
University Debt II: A Longer-Term Perspective
My recent post on university debt presented data on total enrollment, total long-term debt and the debt to revenue ratio for 20 Ontario universities in 2012. I recently updated the numbers and was able to extend the data backwards to 2000 for many but not all of the same universities. For those of you who […]
Canadian Macro Performance: Better than the G-7 but…
We are of course quite used to repeated claims that Canada has outperformed all other G-7 countries in job creation and GDP growth during the recovery from the 2009 recession. Our better fiscal performance is also trotted out especially with respect to the net debt to GDP ratio. However, if instead of the G-7, we […]
Wealth, Religion and Inequality
In nineteenth century Canada, religion was a very important institutional and social force and via its social networks affected employment opportunities and ultimately income. Via both direct and indirect effects, religious affiliation invariably affected asset accumulation and wealth and by extension must also have affected wealth inequality. Indeed, when it comes to examining the wealth […]
University Debt: The Perils of Being Small
You may recall my recent post on Ontario university financing in which I focused on the university debt levels of Brock, Wilfrid Laurier and Guelph given that they were undergoing program reviews designed to address “sustainability”. Well, I have done a bit of an update by getting information on long-term debt, total revenues and enrolment […]
A Brief Retrospective on the Public Sector
What better way to mark the eve of the Canadian Civic Holiday weekend than with a quick civically engaged overview of the growth of the public sector from a historical perspective. In his 2011 Governments versus Markets: The Changing Economic Role of the State, Vito Tanzi provides a table on general government expenditures as a […]
Does the End of Growth Mean the Rise of Inequality?
Classical economics argued that eventually a stationary state or the end of economic growth was going to be reached but they did not forsee the technological change of 19th century industrialization. The result was income and wealth growing by leaps and bounds. However, yet another paper – this time by Thomas Piketty and Gabriel Zucman […]
Mourning Detroit
Well, I have never been to Detroit and have only glimpsed it live from across the river in Windsor once. Yet, its bankruptcy has caught my interest because for the longest time in Thunder Bay we used to get our cable feed from Detroit (they then shifted away a few years ago to Minneapolis) and […]
A Digression on University Finance
Well, you may have caught Alex Usher’s HESA post this week on university finances. He presented data on university operating budgets from the CAUBO/Statistics Canada financial survey for the period 2007-08 to 2011-12 that shows that university budgets went up by 28 percent. This is quite intriguing because while universities maintain they have been having […]
Crime and Macroeconomics
The Banca D’Italia – Italy’s central bank – supports and promotes a wide range of research activity including quite a bit even in the area of economic history, which for an economic historian like myself is especially heart warming to see. The ongoing Euro Zone economic downturn and crisis naturally also spawns a lot of […]
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
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