A recent issue of The Economist highlighted the stellar economic performance of Australia – or as it was termed, “The Wonder Down Under” – arguing its economy is most arguably the most successful in the rich world. Australia has apparently not seen a recession for 27 years, seen its median income has grown four times […]
Suppose you need a bicycle to get to work. Suppose bicycles are a common property resource, because bike locks don't work. Every night the workers deposit their bicycles in the bike bank, and in the morning it's first come first served. And suppose that sometimes there aren't enough bicycles to go around. So sometimes the […]
The Bank of Canada has released an archive of the staff projections prepared for the Governing Council for the quarterly Monetary Policy Reports. There's a five year lag, so the most recent set of projections are the ones prepared in 2013Q4. While these projections don't answer the question "What was the Governing Council thinking?", it […]
In their 2018 Budget, the Liberal government committed to increased full-time employment of women as part of its gender equality agenda. Is that goal attainable? The employment rate of women in Canada increased steadily from 1976 up until the 2008 financial crisis. Since that time, the percentage of women over 25 who are employed has been […]
An earlier post noted that the real earnings gains over the past 20 years were as clean an example of a composition effect as you're likely to see. Earnings among full-time workers with a given level of education have shown some modest growth over time, but average earnings growth for all full-time workers has been […]
Here are the results of my Twitter poll: This post is my interpretation of those results. I recognise all the usual caveats. I am more concerned about bias in the sampling method than in the small size of the sample (because it's not that small). The people who follow me on Twitter (or who follow […]
And by 'we', I mean 'Canadians'. A lot has been said and written about the decline in the labour share of income, usually calculated as total employee compensation divided by nominal GDP. This decline is generally regarded as a negative development: the reduction in the share of income going to workers is interpreted as a […]
Business cycles are not symmetric; if you flipped the time-series data upside-down the fluctuations would look different. Recessions are usually quick; recoveries are usually slow. And Milton Friedman's "Plucking Model" seems to fit the data: big falls in economic activity are usually followed by big increases; but big increases are not usually followed by big […]
This is an attempt by someone who is not very good at math to understand the alleged "indeterminacy problem" of central banks using market signals of expected inflation to help them target inflation (or whatever). [I used to do rifle shooting at school. "If you can't group you can't shoot". But if you could group, […]
As you may know, Nick has retired from teaching. His career as a teacher and blogger has earned him this very nice tribute in the pages of The Economist: Learning macro is a source of anxiety for many students. Teaching it can give their professors the jitters, too. The subject is notoriously difficult to explain […]
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