Category The 2008-9 recession
Two ‘what ifs’ about Canadian macroeconomic policy during the recession
There's a lot for econobloggers in the US and Europe to get exercised about. They are facing serious problems, and their policy makers have demonstrated an alarming inability to deal with them. It's harder for Canadian econobloggers – okay, for this particular econoblogger – to put together arguments documenting how Canadian policy makers got things […]
Employment, Economic Comparisons and EU Trade
Despite continually being told that Canada has been one of the top economic performers throughout the recent world recession and financial crisis, we are not content to rest on our laurels and it appears that we continue to strive for better things. Canada is in the process of negotiating a comprehensive Free Trade agreement with […]
Fiscal policy, ideology, and framing
TiC Take a standard New Keynesian macro model. Assume it sometimes gets stuck in a ZLB liquidity trap, where monetary policy can't work. There is a very simple solution: use fiscal policy. Government spending should be cut whenever the economy is not in a liquidity trap. That is the clear policy implication of New Keynesian […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Why I’m Not Worried About Italy’s Economy
With all the doom and gloom about Europe’s economy and the debt crisis, some recent statistics from the Italian Central Bank caused me to reflect that despite its problems, the Italian economy is more robust than one might think because of its strong performance when it comes to private wealth.
Quebec employment watch: le mystère persiste
The hunt for data that are consistent with the sharp drop in employment reported by the Labour Force Survey in November and December ([1],[2]) continues. Today's release of initial Employment Insurance claims for November don't look like what we'd see in an economy that was seeing a sharp jump in unemployment:
It’s still too early to tell what is going on in the Quebec labour market
I still don't know why – or even if – the Quebec labour market is doing as badly as the numbers I've presented here and in Economy Lab suggest. It turns out that almost all of the bad news comes from two consecutive bad LFS numbers from November and December. As I discussed here, there's a […]
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
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