Category Stephen Gordon
Job tenures and the gig economy
A few weeks ago, Alex Usher drew my attention to this post by the Pew Research Center, on job tenure patterns of 18-35 year-olds in the United States. The takeaway point was that, contrary to an oft-repeated narrative about the "new gig economy", job tenure patterns among millennials resemble those of the generation previous. Of […]
L’affaire Potter
You are all, I think, familiar with the details of L'Affaire Potter, so I need not enumerate them here. If you aren't already familiar with this story, you probably don't care what I have to say about it, so you can skip the rest of this post. But as a Quebec-based academic with a weekly […]
Internal migration flows in Canada
Discussions about demographics are typically focused on trends in fertility/morbidity and immigration/emigration, and these are what matter at the national level. But at the local level, trends on internal migration are also important. Statistics Canada has been publishing data on inter-provincial migration for years, but there's only so much you can get out of them. […]
Project Link: Piecing together recent Canadian economic history
I've already ranted a couple of times – here and here – about Statistics Canada's 'Attention Deficit Disorder': its habit of starting new time series using new methodologies without updating the historical data. As I put it in my first rant, Statistics Canada must be the only statistical agency in the world where the average […]
The economics of SSHRC research grants IV: A collective action problem
As irritating as it was, SSHRC's infatuation with Research in Buzzword Studies is not why Insight Grant (IG) success rates have stayed so low, even as the budget envelope has increased. The problem is the hard-won budgetary rigour that was established during the last years of the old Standard Research Grant (SRG) program disappeared when […]
The economics of SSHRC research grants III: Research in Buzzword Studies
When SSHRC replaced the old Standard Research Grant (SRG) program with the Insight Grant (IG) program, it did more than simply increase the budget for research grants. It also introduced "priority research areas" (see Frances on this here) that would receive special attention. It turned out that the amounts allocated to these new research areas would […]
The economics of SSHRC research grants II: Cutting and restoring budgets
In the first post of this series, I noted that much of the reduction in SSHRC research grant success rates during the transition from the old 3-year Standard Research Grants (SRG) to the new 5-year Insight Grants (IG) could be explained by the stock-flow dynamics of changing grant durations. But that's not the whole story: success rates […]
The economics of SSHRC research grants I: Why are success rates so low?
I've participated a few times in the adjudication process for the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) research grant programs: twice as a reviewer, and three times as chair. (Chairs have to be bilingual, so Quebec profs are often called up to serve as chair.) Regular WCI readers – and of course researchers in humanities […]
Bargaining power and the incidence of taxes on high earners in Canada
Today I'm presenting a paper at the meetings of the Canadian Economics Association: "Bargaining power and the incidence of taxes on high earners in Canada." The bottom line is that once you take into account the fact that high earners have bargaining power – that's why they are high earners in the first place! – […]
How much revenue will the Liberals generate with a new tax bracket on high earners?
[I started writing this post in May, but I stopped when it looked like the Liberals were not going to be in a position to implement this measure. Happily, I didn't actually delete it.] [An earlier version made a stupid mistake; I did everything under tha assumption that the increase was 3 percentage points, and […]
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
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