Category Mike Moffatt
Taxation in Canada – Part III: The Case Against Personal Income Taxes
When I was an undergraduate, I remember hearing the following argument from a very smart non-economics student friend of mine: There is no real benefit to lowering income taxes – it’s an illusion. Yes, if income taxes are lowered, people might decide to work more overtime. But what would they be doing with that time […]
As if we needed more fuel on the fire…
The Celebrating pointlessness: minimum wage edition thread has been going on strong for over two weeks. Can we turn the fire into a raging inferno? From today’s Huffington Post: Minimum Wage, and Controversy, Reaches Distant U.S. Islands, on a Government Accountability Office on the minimum wage which was released today. A PDF of the study […]
DIY Economics: Canadian Dollar Edition
I have made available the data set I discussed in The Correlation Between Oil Prices and the Canadian Dollar: 1995-2010. Excel file here: Canadian Dollar Data. Would love to see what you come up with!
The Correlation Between Oil Prices and the Canadian Dollar: 1995-2010
In an effort to improve the MERT (Moffatt Exchange Rate Toy), I constructed a data set of 3821 daily observations from January 3, 1995 to March 30, 2010 of five variables: FEDFUN: The Effective (Actual) Federal Funds Rate (U.S.) OVRNRT: The Effective (Actual) Overnight Money Market Financing Rate (CAN) INTGAP: OVRNRT – FEDFUN. The difference […]
Because You Asked For It: Small Business Strategy and the Canadian Dollar
Reader westslope recently asked: BTW, does your company top brass pay attention to your MERT model and, perhaps, strategically plan and hedge accordingly? That’s an easy one for me to answer because I am charge of the finances for Nexreg (a small Canadian company that makes the majority of their sales in the U.S.). What […]
The Value of the Canadian Dollar in 2009-2010, Oil Prices and Interest Rates
About a decade ago when I was giving econometrics tutorials at the University of Rochester I asked my students to calculate the correlation between oil prices and the value of the Canadian dollar relative to greenback. Out of that was born MERT – my toy exchange rate predictor.
Productivity, the Canadian Dollar and Small Business – A Case Study
Based on a true story one of my clients had to deal with (besides teaching at Ivey, I am a consultant to the chemical industry). The following case explains why there could be, at least in theory, a relationship between productivity levels and fluctuations in the Canadian dollar. Consider a small company in Brampton that […]
Taxation in Canada – Part II: Constraints Faced When Designing a Tax System
In Part I we saw that the goals of taxation were two-fold: to collect revenue for the government and to discourage certain activities. However, the government hoarding Jacques Plante as an Edmonton Oiler hockey cards in an attempt to reduce the after-tax income of rich-people is not aligned with our goals. If there were no […]
Taxation in Canada – Part I: What Are the Purposes of Taxation?
This is the first in a series of posts that will examine the tax system in Canada, from an economist’s point of view. If we better understand how the tax system works, we can find ways to improve it. It turns out that there are a number of ways the Canadian tax system can be […]
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
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