Category Stephen Gordon
Tracking the Bank of Canada’s staff projections through the 2008-9 recession
The Bank of Canada has released an archive of the staff projections prepared for the Governing Council for the quarterly Monetary Policy Reports. There's a five year lag, so the most recent set of projections are the ones prepared in 2013Q4. While these projections don't answer the question "What was the Governing Council thinking?", it […]
Are education attainment levels the root cause of all good earnings news?
An earlier post noted that the real earnings gains over the past 20 years were as clean an example of a composition effect as you're likely to see. Earnings among full-time workers with a given level of education have shown some modest growth over time, but average earnings growth for all full-time workers has been […]
Why do we care about the labour share of income?
And by 'we', I mean 'Canadians'. A lot has been said and written about the decline in the labour share of income, usually calculated as total employee compensation divided by nominal GDP. This decline is generally regarded as a negative development: the reduction in the share of income going to workers is interpreted as a […]
A well-deserved tribute to Nick Rowe
As you may know, Nick has retired from teaching. His career as a teacher and blogger has earned him this very nice tribute in the pages of The Economist: Learning macro is a source of anxiety for many students. Teaching it can give their professors the jitters, too. The subject is notoriously difficult to explain […]
Project Link update
I've just updated Project Link, my attempt to piece together the bits and pieces of published Statistics Canada data into a coherent history of the post-war Canadian economy. (The introductory post is here, and a post on the first update is here.) Here are the main elements: Incorporating Statistics Canada's long-awaited publication of its expenditure […]
Gross Domestic Income in Canada, 1947-2018
The latest update of Project Link includes estimates for national accounts income measures: Gross National Income (formerly known as Gross National Product), Net National Income, compensation of employees, and disposable income, all going back to 1947Q1. I've also added Gross Domestic Income. GDI is a fairly recent arrival in the national accounts, and it takes […]
How much more can governments spend by switching to a debt ratio target?
In my recent National Post column, I make reference to some back-of-envelope calculations to the effect that replacing the fiscal anchor of balanced budgets to one of a fixed debt-GDP ratio allows the federal government to increase spending by 1.2 percentage points of GDP, or by about $25 billion. I'm going to work through the […]
Regional disparities in Canadian economic growth: Theory and evidence
In its recent release of income data from the 2015 census, Statistics Canada helpfully provided data tables for median incomes in 2005 and 2015 for various regions in Canada. The headline number was the 12.7% increase in median Canadian incomes, and there's been some commentary about how the gains during the last decade were not […]
Project Link update: Labour Force Survey, 1953-2017
I've updated and expanded the data archived on Project Link, my attempt to take the fragments of data published by Statistics Canada and piece them together into a coherent whole. In my post introducing Project Link, I made note of a chart I came across while putting together the headline data from the Labour […]
A composition effect in earnings growth and education attainment levels in Canada
I came across this post by Mickey Kaus a while ago, on trends in US earnings broken down by education attainment levels. From about the mid-70s to the mid-90s, earnings growth diverged sharply: increasing strongly for those with high levels of education, and falling for people with lower levels of education. Earnings growth has been […]
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
Recent Comments