There's been a certain amount of commentary on today's GDP release. An annualised growth rate of 0.4% for 2009Q3 is better than zero - and it's at the 80th percentile of the predictive density generated by my toy predictor - but it's not what you'd call a strong [...]
Most macroeconomists take a Ricardian regime as their unspoken assumption; and, if pressed, would recommend a [...]
I went. And apparently it's being sold as a Big Deal; here's the speech. Here are the points I was curious about last week:
Is this a real policy proposal, or a recital of Conservative failures? A healthy dose of the latter, and some generalities. No details, though. [...]Ed Broadbent had an op-ed in Tuesday's Globe on a plan to reduce child poverty, and he offers this proposal:
In the next budget, let's impose a six-point increase in income tax on those earning more than $250,000 a year (whose average taxable income is $600,000). While leaving them with very high [...]Similarities:
S1. Both do general equilibrium analysis, trying to understand the interaction between parts of a whole system, with lots of positive and/or negative feedback loops.
S2. Both have got time-series data that show how different variables are correlated. We try to explain those correlations by building models. Sometimes we can use [...]
It's hard to believe that I've managed to run a blog on the Canadian economy for more than four years without having a go at what is Canada's most fragrant example of bad economic policy. Happily, the Conference Board has just published a paper summarising the sorry state of [...]
MM Veldhuis and Lammam respond to my post on their op-ed in the National Post last week, and Kevin Milligan summarises a couple of their points:
1. The PBO would not be exactly like the CBO therefore no parallels to the CBO may be drawn.When we last left this story, inflation was drifting further and further below the Bank of Canada's inflation target, and the CAD was up to 0.97 USD. The case for intervening in the forex market to slow the appreciation of the CAD - and hence slow the drift to [...]
Today's National Post has an op-ed written by a couple of Fraser Institute types entitled "Scrap the Parliamentary Budget Office". It's a remarkable piece of rhetoric. Although its stated purpose is to make the case for eliminating the PBO, it ends up demonstrating once again why an effective PBO [...]
To paraphrase Churchill, accountants and economists are divided by a common language. We seem to be using the same words to talk about the same things, but we don't understand what the other is saying. This is my attempt to provide an economist's perspective on the relation between accounting and [...]
It's not often that the internal Laval e-mail listserve grabs my attention. I guess I have to go, if only to satisfy my curiosity about the following points:
Is this a real policy proposal, or a recital of Conservative failures? Cap-and-trade, or a carbon tax? How much material can he cover in [...]Don Martin loses it in today's National Post:
Clock tallies IOU to next generation: Stephen Harper will join Jean Chretien as only the second prime minister in history to enroll Canada in the half-trillion-dollar national debt club.This is silly. Nominal debt figures from 1995 - when the federal debt first went above [...]
Bryan Caplan asks the question of why more academic economists don't use Bayesian methods. It's a question academic Bayesian economists ask ourselves pretty often.
One part of the answer is that many already are informal Bayesians. For example, the whole DSGE literature would be uninteresting (or even more uninteresting, depending [...]
The Department of Finance publishes monthly data for expenditures, revenues and the deficit. These numbers don't necessarily correspond to the annual numbers (for example, various items are sometimes booked to a fiscal year after it's over), but it gives us a good idea of where the government's finances are [...]
Last night I was chatting with someone who works for a think-tank. I work for Carleton University. We both work for charities. Like households, firms, and governments, charities have income and expenses, and a net worth. Consumer choice theory tells us, at least in principle, how much people should save, [...]
In an upcoming post, I'm going to try to thrash out some of the details about the origins of the federal budget deficit, with an idea to figuring out how to make it go whence it came. But first, I'm going to set out some historical background, now that the [...]
We always knew that interest rate targeting could never work in theory, because it left the price level indeterminate. But it seemed to work well in practice, and kept inflation close to target, so we eventually learned to overcome our theoretical squeamishness and embrace it as part of the reality [...]
Cuban blogger Yoani Sanchez reports being beaten up and abducted by Cuban...quasi-authorities, for being a "counter-revolutionary" (i.e. having an independent blog). Check out her blog Generation Y.
I normally stick to economics, but have decided to make a rare exception here. I follow Yoani's blog, to help keep me in [...]
Scott Sumner argues that nominal interest rates are near zero because monetary policy (specifically expected future monetary policy) is too tight. He argues that tight (expected future) monetary policy makes expected inflation low, which makes nominal rates low. He also argues that tight (expected future) monetary policy makes real [...]
I am going to start with an orthodox monetarist approach, make one trivial semantic change, and see how far I can get in deriving Neo-Chartalist results. The semantic change is to change what I mean by "fiscal policy". It's an unconventional definition of fiscal policy, from a monetarist [...]
If a social scientist wanted to understand what happens in church, he could ask the churchgoers themselves for an account of what they do in church. But the social scientist's account of what happens in church need not be the same as the churchgoers' account.
If an economist wanted to understand [...]
The most recent issue of Canadian Public Policy has this short note:
Minimum Wage Increases as an Anti-Poverty Policy in Ontario: In this article, we consider the possibility of alleviating poverty in Ontario through minimum wage increases. Using survey data from 2004 to profile low wage earners and poor households, [...]
