Category Stephen Gordon
Another view of the sluggish US labour market
My latest post at the Globe and Mail's Economy Lab talks about the distinction between the net changes in employment reported by the Labour Force Survey and the gross flows in and out of employment. In preparation for that post, I looked up the data from the US Job Opening and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS) […]
Economic nationalism and potash
Those were the topics of an online discussion in which I participated at the Globe and Mail this morning.
A preliminary estimate for Canadian 2010Q3 GDP growth
The August 2010 GDP numbers have been released (increase of 0.3% over July), so It's time once again to update my series of posts (most recent: 2010Q2) in which I try to take the GDP numbers from the first two months of a given quarter, mix them with the LFS numbers from the third month, […]
The NDP’s misdiagnosis
A couple of weeks ago, the NDP suggested removing the GST from heating bills, and I bemoaned the idea as just another example of a policy designed to fit a communications strategy instead of the other way around. I was hoping that the proposal would do the decent thing and go away quietly, but the […]
Corporate tax cuts by the numbers
The federal government is set to reduce corporate income tax (CIT) rates from 18% to 16.5% in January of 2011, and then again to 15% in 2012. The effects of these measures have been characterised in two ways: $6b per year in tax revenues. The Liberals use this number when they explain that they are […]
How does an appreciating Canadian dollar prevent improvements in innovation?
Dan Trefler's op-ed in Saturday's Globe and Mail had this passage: Do we want to be an innovation-based economy? Or do we want to be a resource-based economy? Unfortunately, we can’t be both. The loonie won’t let us. Why can't we be both?
Economy Lab: Why Canada’s manufacturing sector is dwindling
That's the title of my latest post on the Globe and Mail's Economy Lab site.
An updated history of the federal budget balance
I did a round of interviews for CBC radio on Tuesday after the federal government's fiscal update was released, and it was often remarked that the 2009-10 deficit of $55.6b was the largest ever. I suppose I should have said that it sounds even larger if you say it was 5.56 trillion cents. These numbers […]
Why would we assume that high earners are price takers in the labour market?
Greg Mankiw's column in the New York Times makes the point that available evidence – in the US as well as Canada – suggests that high earners have higher labour supply elasticities than do workers lower down in the income distribution. As a result, increasing income tax rates on high earners would have disproportionately stronger […]
“Canada’s Budget Triumph” – some additional context for the US
David Henderson* of GMU has a working paper (h/t Tyler Cowen) on the story of how Canada's federal government solved its budget balance woes during the latter half of the 1990's, with almost no apparent ill effects. Much of the paper sets out the political context that made this possible, and is very useful in […]
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
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