Category Teaching
Teaching Purchasing Power Parity
This is a simple post about how I have been teaching Purchasing Power Parity in ECON1000 for the last couple of years.
Test driving Canada’s new open data portal
Canada, following the lead of the US (http://data.gov), the UK (http://data.gov.uk/), and Australia (http://www.ands.org.au/) has created a new open data portal, http://data.gc.ca. The data portal contains all of Statistics Canada's CANSIM data, as well as data from the Department of Finance, Health Canada, Environment Canada, Transport Canada, Citizen and Immigration Canada, and so on. To try […]
Teen Sex and Econometrics
The Canadian Community Health Survey asks respondents "In the past 12 months, have you had sexual intercourse?". The overwhelming majority of 18 to 19 years, when asked that question, answered….
Teaching SRAS shocks
I hate teaching Short Run Aggregate Supply shocks. 1. It's easy to teach them wrong. 2. I don't understand them very well. 3. I don't think anyone understands them very well.
How to videos by MumblingProfessor
I've created some videos (screen recordings) for my third year taxation course, showing how to download data from CANSIM, adjust it for inflation, and do some other basic analysis.
Money as store of wealth?
This is something that always bugs me with the textbooks' definition of money. They start out well. They provide a functional definition of money; "money is what money does". If people in a given time and place use cigarettes as money, then cigarettes are money, in that time and place. Moneyness is not a property […]
Putting the Econ into Econometrics
I have the 1988 and 2009 editions Gujarati and Porter's Basic Econometrics in front of me. Chapter 1 has been updated for the 21st century: The Internet has literally revolutionized data gathering. If you just "surf the net" with a keyword (e.g. exchange rates), you will be swamped with all kinds of data sources. In […]
Pigou and Paternalism
Here is a question from the final exam for my public finance course: A typical person’s demand for potato chips is given by p=5-q where q=the number of packages of chips purchased, and p is the price of chips in dollars per package. The marginal cost of producing potato chips is $1 per package. The […]
Low vs falling prices, and relative vs absolute prices, Intro Econ again
The discussion of Intro Economics in my last post got a bit esoteric at times. I want to bring us all back down to earth. This morning I got an email from a student who took my Intro Economics course last year. He works in retail, selling hi-tech goods. He asked me this question: hi-tech […]
God and Man at Harvard
60 years ago an undergraduate at an "Ivy League" US university didn't like the economics and politics that were being taught there. He didn't boycott classes. Instead he wrote a book about it. The full title of William F. Buckley's book is "God and Man at Yale: the Superstitions of 'Academic Feedom'". (I haven't read […]
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
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