Nick Rowe asks: “I want to know why some prices seem to be stickier than others, and why some prices don’t seem to be sticky at all. If I understood why customers liked sticky prices, this should help me understand these differences in price stickiness. Perhaps customers for crude oil are different from customers for […]

A recent comment by Scott Sumner caught my eye: Reading Russ’s paper makes me realize just how much our system is biased toward debt. And by the way, it isn’t just moral hazard; our tax system is also biased toward debt and against equity. People talk about Americans borrowing too much, but given all these […]

I’m fighting my annual summer cold this week, so I thought I’d do a bit of a lighter topic today. About a month ago I saw an interview on TVO with Michael Lerner who played gambler Arnold Rothstein in one of my all-time favourite movies Eight Men Out. Lerner made the claim that Eight Men […]

From a widely cited Paul Krugman piece: Yep, you can have fiscal austerity without contraction if you have a massive devaluation against your main trading partner. So we can have austerity without a new depression as long as all the world’s major economies devalue against … oh, wait. And monetary policy, of course, wasn’t up […]

It is a bit of a strange question to ask, but I thought I would follow up on How Difficult Will It Be For the Federal Liberals to Win an Election? by asking the same question from the point of view of the Conservatives. Other than flukes (1958) and the Mulroney elections (1984, 1988) the […]

In response to Liberal/NDP merger talk I decided to examine past election data to see how difficult it will be for the Liberals to beat the Conservatives in a future election. The Liberal recipe for success during the 20th century has largely been to absolutely dominate Quebec and try not to get beat up too […]

Anyone who has taught microeconomics has, at one time, had to deal with the question, That’s all very nice, professor, but how am I supposed to use any of this in the real world? If I’m running a business, I’m not going to know the demand curve for the product and I’m not going to […]

I have been in Cancún the past week on my honeymoon (even though we’ve been married for two-and-a-half years – long story). She’s off at the spa, so I thought I’d take this chance to write a blog post. My wife and I took a day trip to Chichén Itzá – if you ever get […]

This probably should be part of my tax series, but I thought I would pose the question to the readership. Provincial and municipal governments are always looking for additional money, but taxes are unpopular and have unpleasant economic side effects. Municipal governments and school boards also need to assign names to roads and schools. Why […]