So I opened up a twitter account yesterday – you may have noticed the button at the bottom of the sidebar at right. It's something of an experiment, and I'll probably just use it for things that I can't work up to a fully-fledged blog post. There are a lot of those. Today I used […]
Does this question make sense: "Is debt too high?"? It certainly makes sense for me to ask whether my debt is too high. Should I try to earn more income, reduce my consumption, or sell off some assets? And if a friend asks me whether his debt is too high, I could offer him advice […]
The federal government brings down its budget on Thursday. From what I can gather from various media stories, the word is that it'll be pretty thin. The two-year stimulus package announced last year will continue as planned, and no new tax measures are expected. This thread asks the question: what would you like to see […]
Today's GDP release was a pleasant surprise: an annualised growth rate of 5.0% is more than we were expecting. The recovery is well underway, and depending on the measure you look at, something between 30% and 40% of the economic losses generated by the recession have been recovered.
Most economists believe that for a given path of nominal interest rates chosen by the central bank, a looser fiscal policy (higher deficits, through lower taxes and/or higher spending) will cause higher Aggregate Demand, and therefore higher real output and/or inflation. Therefore, if a central bank is choosing a path for nominal interest rates in […]
If you wanted to build a "fire-and-forget" fiscal policy, or where you at least minimised the chances you would ever again want to change any of the tax and spend rules, what would it look like? I was thinking about Stephen's question: if we had a good enough social safety net, wouldn't that create a […]
In the debates on the need for a fiscal stimulus, both sides generally agreed that this particular policy instrument is one of the clumsiest available to policy makers. The dangers are well-known and well-documented: getting the timing wrong, getting the targets wrong, political interference, the risk of seeing a temporary spending program turn into a […]
Roger Farmer is an old grad skool buddy. We were in the same MA and PhD class at UWO in the late 1970's, though we have lost touch a bit over the decades. That's a sort of disclaimer. Roger preferred punk to disco; I think he was right on that score. But Peter Diamond's "A […]
I'm recycling this old post in celebration of Lucien Bouchard's call for an increase in Quebec university tuition fees. The Quebec government has just released a collection of studies on financing education, including this one (121-page pdf, in French) written by Valérie Vierstraete, a professor of economics at the Université de Sherbrooke. It addresses exactly […]
As was the case in Ontario, recent evidence from the US illustrates the pointlessness of using the minimum wage as a way to reduce poverty (h/t Craig Newmark): Minimum Wages and Poverty: Will a $9.50 Federal Minimum Wage Really Help the Working Poor? Using data drawn from the March Current Population Survey, we find that […]
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