In 2000 Milton Friedman gave a keynote address to the Bank of Canada, which is available for download here [PDF]. The keynote itself is interesting, but moreso are his responses to a Q&A session, where he talks about issues such as the future euro and monetary policy at the zero lower bound.  Here, without commentary, are […]

Environment Canada has emissions data on 537 facilities in Canada. As Andrew Leach points out these only cover roughly 35% of emissions in Canada, but they provide some useful data. Unfortunately the emissions are not ranked by who emits the most.  So I took it upon myself to do so, with some pretty big technical support […]

From today's Globe and Mail: In the decades prior to 2000, Canada made progress in moving away from being an economy of resource extraction. By that year, as labour economist Jim Stanford has pointed out in an analysis for the Centre for Policy Alternatives, well over half of Canada’s exports consisted of an increasingly sophisticated […]

Not so much a blog post as it is a cry for help. I am finally defending my thesis on Tuesday.  I am at a Business School (Ivey), but the thesis, Revenue Management in Multi-Firm, Multi-Product Price Competition is of a traditional Industrial Organization sort. For those of you who have been through the process – any […]

I was delighted to see Martin Regg Cohn write on the closure of the Electro-Motive plant in London, Ontario.  Unfortunately the piece suffers from a number of commonly held misconceptions.

This week the Ottawa Citzen published my op ed on the impact of technological growth on manufacturing: Where the jobs went.  Jim Stanford of the CAW responded with: The real job killers, also published in the Citizen.  A couple of points I would like to respond to:

I am writing a piece on the Electro-Motive dispute in Canada and needed data on equipment and machinery.  I had forgotten which CANSIM series I was looking for and asked if anyone knew.  Reader Chris Hylarides pointed me towards a piece written by… Stephen Gordon.  Not only did Stephen's piece have the data I was looking […]

It is possible to make good arguments that CEOs are overpaid.  However, it is also possible to make really, really bad arguments.  Sadly, I have seen more of the latter than the former.  The bad arguments have something in common – they rely on the Grandfather Fallacy, a term I picked up from Steven Landsburg […]

A story in today's Toronto Star: A secret National Hockey League report detailing the ticket revenues of its 30 teams provides additional ammunition for those suggesting more struggling U.S.-based teams should be relocated to Canada. The confidential document shows that the six Canadian NHL clubs last season accounted for about 33 per cent of the […]

In the 1985 edition of his Baseball Abstract, Bill James published his Keltner List, a series of 15 questions designed to evaluate a baseball player's worthiness for the Hall of Fame. I have a similar, albeit shorter, list of questions I like to ask when analyzing public policy proposals.