Category Stephen Gordon
How many Canadians are losing and finding jobs?
A couple of weeks ago, I noted that as far as I could make out from available data, rates of job creation returned to pre-recession levels more than a year ago. This time, I'm going to try to get a handle on the gross flows on the other side of the market – that is, in […]
Appeasing anti-tax sentiment
Alex Himelfarb has an opinion piece in today's Globe and Mail on the 'anti-tax' sentiment that has grown to play such a dominant role in Canadian politics. Although I agree with his diagnosis, his prescriptions are not so much a plan for countering anti-tax sentiment as they are a symptom of its hold on public […]
How to borrow money
The process is quite easy, provided you borrow enough. Have you ever, dear readers, had occasion to borrow money? Have you ever borrowed ten dollars under a rigorous promise of your word of honor as a Christian to pay it back on your next salary day? Have you ever borrowed as much as a million […]
Why do people think that Canadian job creation rates require a policy response?
Pundits and politicians are calling on the government to "do something" about the state of the Canadian labour market; these calls are presumably based on a perception that job growth is still weak. It's not clear upon which data this assessment is based. The data that would be most informative are no longer being collected, […]
Hysteresis in the teaching of econometrics
When I was a graduate student – some 25 years ago – there was a practical reason for why Bayesian methods played little or no role in the textbooks. Even though classical methods asked the wrong questions* and forced people to wade through a myriad of complicated and contradictory ways of answering them, it was […]
The world wants more US government debt. The US Treasury should supply it.
This fascinating story came out during the psychodrama of the US debt ceiling: U.S. Treasury debt prices soared on Friday on fears a U.S. default could trigger a shortage of Treasuries and even push the world's largest economy back into recession. On the face of it, this makes no sense. The market's reaction to a […]
Why would private-sector firms make their forecasts public?
Suppose you had invested a certain amount of resources into researching the geology of Northern Quebec and had identified a region where there was a near-certainty of finding gold. Would you tell everyone? Or would you keep your findings to yourself and quietly acquire the necessary mining rights? The Bank of Montreal released a report […]
Can demographics explain why the income shares of high earners have increased?
The increasing concentration of incomes among a small number of high earners has been documented at length here ([1], [2], [3]) and elsewhere. Any sensible response to this development has to be based on at least a partial understanding of how and why this trend began – and we still don't have a theory that […]
On trends in inequality in Canada, the United Kingdom and Sweden
The Conference Board released a study on trends in inequality, so I decided to update the data from this old post. Here's what I found: if you measure inequality using the Gini index, you'd conclude that after increasing during the 1980's, inequality levels had stabilised since 1995.
Ponzi and pensions
This post was written by Simon van Norden of HEC-Montréal. Since the Republican candidates’ debate, the debate about public pensions has heated up, partly because one of the front runners claims that US Social Security is a “Ponzi Scheme.” Now, that’s a clever choice of words, because most associate “Ponzi Scheme” with a fraud ( […]
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
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