Category Stephen Gordon
How OECD governments generate tax revenues
I did a post last year documenting the choices OECD countries have made when it comes to tax rates – you might want to take a look at it before continuing. I'll wait here. Okay, welcome back. Given the recent attention ([1],[2],[3]) given to the link between tax rates and tax revenues, this post is […]
An erratum on US employment flows during the recession
In my most recent post, I did some eyeball econometrics and missed something. It turns out that Canadian and US employment flows during the recession were not quite as dissimilar as I had thought. (Thanks to Dan Kervick in the comments for catching it.)
Flows in and out of employment during the recession
These are the slides I prepared for this conference a few weeks ago in Ottawa, in which I tried to get a handle on the gross flows in and out of employment during the recession, and how it compared to the US experience. It's actually the extended version of those slides; I ended up hacking […]
Live, on tape delay, it’s the federal budget
I'm about to leave for Ottawa to take part in this conference (program here). My original plan was to arrive early and spend the day touring Ottawa, but then the government decided that March 29 would also be budget day. So I'll be spending the day instead at the budget lockup with the Globe and Mail team. […]
FIRE! FIRE in the labour market!
The story of the Canadian labour market in the second half of 2011 was a recovery knocked off course by events in international financial markets. The crises associated with the US debt ceiling and European sovereign debt drove down commodity prices and the Canadian dollar. So the fact that employment growth slowed in the wake […]
Anke Kessler on the effects of robocalls on voter turnout
One of the (many!) important questions raised by the robocall scandal is whether or not the deceptive calls did in fact achieve their presumed goal of inducing supporters of opposition parties to stay home and not vote. If you look at riding-level data, there's not much to see. But Simon Fraser University's Anke Kessler has […]
How much new revenue will be generated by an increase in federal corporate taxes?
It's budget season, and there's a federal deficit to worry about. The government wants to cut spending, and the opposition parties want to increase taxes on high earners as well as corporate income taxes (CIT) instead. (No-one wants to increase the GST.) In a recent Economy Lab post, I went through the arithmetic of calculating […]
The federal budget: it’s (probably) time for a (mild) fiscal contraction
It is widely believed that the March 29 federal budget will make cuts in program spending, and the Conservative government seems to have done a very good job of preparing public opinion for them. I've written a few Economy Lab posts ([1], [2], [3]) on the topic without actually coming down on any side of […]
An update on the apparently non-existent Quebec recession
It's been five or six weeks since I noted that there was something strange about the Quebec LFS employment numbers. A one per cent drop in employment in the space of two months looked like the ohmygodweareallgonnadie months of early 2009, but there didn't seem to be any supporting story for why it was happening […]
A preliminary estimate for Canadian 2011Q4 GDP growth
This is a bit late. I ran – but forgot to post – my quarterly attempt to provide an estimate for quarterly GDP growth a month before Statistics Canada releases its first estimates (most recent exercise is here). This is done by using simple linear regression model of monthly GDP growth on monthly LFS data […]
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