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These data stop in 2010, so they can't speak to that.
What happened to real incomes in the 1970s?
Here are the estimates for average and median total incomes based on tax file data (see this post for details): I was comforted to see that the estimates for median incomes after 1976 have the same U-shape as those in the Statistics Canada tables : The fact that the two data sources say basi...
I almost wrote "If anyone (and by 'anyone', I mean 'Frances') knows..."
Thanks for the references!
Project Link update
It's past time for my annual update for Project Link, my attempt to piece together the fragments of Statistics Canada's published data into coherent time series. Statistics Canada's Attention Deficit Disorder means that I can never assume that the list of series that were current in one year wil...
I wonder to what extent this is similar to the 'immaculate rebalancing' school of balance of payments analyses. There, too, one is tempted to use accounting identities as theories, so people forget that things like exchange rates and interest rates have to move in order to get people to make the decisions that make things balance.
Explaining S=I: Inventories vs Adding up Individuals
It's easy to teach students the arithmetic showing that actual saving must equal actual investment (S=I). But many students (quite rightly) want more than the arithmetic. Because S=I is not intuitive, and good students want to understand the intuition. I think that most profs will try to explain...
Dang. I meant to add that point and forgot.
Why do we care about the labour share of income?
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 ...
Excellent post. Certainly from where I sit, the main obstacle is eligibility: almost all our students are international.
And this touches on a key pont as well: "If my university is typical, economics graduate students have little opportunity to practice writing research proposals, do not have a clear thesis topic in place until the second or third year of their program, and struggle to articulate their methodology using accessible terminology. Faced with drafting a program of study, some students may simply give up."
A (possibly apocryphal) story from my grad school days is the PhD candidate who applied for and received a SSHRC fellowship with the following research proposal: "I will write a PhD thesis in economics."
I've been on the internal SSHRC fellowship grants committee for a few years, and unless you know what economics PhD programs are like, you'd think that our students are a terrible bunch of slackers compared to the proposals submitted from other disciplines.
Why don't more economics students get SSHRC doctoral fellowships?
In 2017*, just seven economics PhD students were awarded SSHRC doctoral fellowships, according to data provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) to the Canadian Economics Association. Put another way, only 1.6 percent of the 430 new SSHRC doctoral fellowships awarde...
Were you able to extract levels of government from the LFS PUMF? Although it's probably true that the vast majority of Ontario public sector workers are provincial/municipal.
The picture that will define Ontario politics for the next four years
In Ontario, public sector employees earn more than private sector employees. Many workers in the private sector earn the minimum wage, or only slightly above minimum wage. The peak of the public sector earnings distribution is much higher, at twenty-something dollars per hour, and there are a go...
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The best and worst paid names on the Ontario sunshine list
The Ontario government publishes an annual "Sunshine List". This is a dataset containing detailed salary information on every Ontario government employee earning over $100,000 per year. The list includes the salaries of public servants, also salaries of people who work in Ontario universities, h...
I apologize for wasting your time.
How much more can governments spend by switching to a debt ratio target?
In my recent National Post column, I make reference to some back-of-envelope calculations to the effect that replacing the fiscal anchor of balanced budgets to one of a fixed debt-GDP ratio allows the federal government to increase spending by 1.2 percentage points of GDP, or by about $25 billio...
Thanks *so* much for the reference! Already downloaded!
Project Link update: Labour Force Survey, 1953-2017
I've updated and expanded the data archived on Project Link, my attempt to take the fragments of data published by Statistics Canada and piece them together into a coherent whole. In my post introducing Project Link, I made note of a chart I came across while putting together the headline data...
This is really good stuff, Frances.
Quebec is a distinct society, parental leave edition
My colleague Jennifer Robson has recently published a study on parental leave for the Institute for Research on Public Policy. It provides a detailed comparison of parental leave in Quebec and the rest of Canada (ROC), and provides a number of recommendations for changing the way that parental l...
That's sort of why I added the qualifier "with job tenure data". To extent that gig=short-term employment contract, these data should pick that up. But I don't see how you could extract information about a gig economy from self-employment data.
Job tenures and the gig economy
A few weeks ago, Alex Usher drew my attention to this post by the Pew Research Center, on job tenure patterns of 18-35 year-olds in the United States. The takeaway point was that, contrary to an oft-repeated narrative about the "new gig economy", job tenure patterns among millennials resemble th...
The flows are July 1 to July 1, so the last observation would have been almost exactly when oil prices stared to fall.
Internal migration flows in Canada
Discussions about demographics are typically focused on trends in fertility/morbidity and immigration/emigration, and these are what matter at the national level. But at the local level, trends on internal migration are also important. Statistics Canada has been publishing data on inter-provinci...
Thanks Frances - this is obviously a topic I've given a lot of thought to. I haven't come to any conclusions, but this helps frame the questions, at least.
Econoblogging - still a Worthwhile Canadian Initiative?
This Friday I will be joining colleagues in international affairs, journalism, public policy and political science to talk about "Academics in the Media Landscape: The Role of Scholar-Columnist-Bloggers". The panel is part of Carleton's Visions for Canada, 2042 conference, which explores "the wa...
Luke - Thanks. I wasn't sure if it was a question of NL drawing people in, or of NL expatriates coming back home after being laid off in the oil and gas sector.
Patrick - yes, I suspect extrapolating 2014-2017 trends would give a very different picture. I'll probably come back to this and see how the estimates for the stable distributions changed.
Internal migration flows in Canada
Discussions about demographics are typically focused on trends in fertility/morbidity and immigration/emigration, and these are what matter at the national level. But at the local level, trends on internal migration are also important. Statistics Canada has been publishing data on inter-provinci...
That's a good point - I cover Bretton Woods right after, so I'll talk about it then.
A forgotten cost of the gold standard.
While waiting for the kettle to boil in the Economics department lounge, I searched for something - anything - to read. Then I spotted the 1961 Ontario Economic Survey on the departmental bookshelf. Opening the old volume at random, I hit gold: A problem peculiar to gold mining is that the price...
Great find! I'm *definitely* adding this to my lecture notes on the gold standard.
A forgotten cost of the gold standard.
While waiting for the kettle to boil in the Economics department lounge, I searched for something - anything - to read. Then I spotted the 1961 Ontario Economic Survey on the departmental bookshelf. Opening the old volume at random, I hit gold: A problem peculiar to gold mining is that the price...
I've been on the internal SSHRC pre-screening committee here, and students in other fields always seem to have 2 or 3 publications by their 2nd or 3rd year - their MA thesis, plus co-authorships with their advisors. I try to explain that it's extremely rare for a PhD student in economics to have even one publication when they graduate, but I don't know if that argument holds much sway at the adjudications in Ottawa.
And then there's the grade inflation point. I see a lot of straight A or A+ files in other fields, almost never in economics.
Economists don't get SSHRC money, grad student edition
The other day a colleague was explaining how SSHRC-funded Canada Graduate Scholarships are awarded at my university. "It's mostly driven by GPA," he said. "Grades in economics are so low that your students don't get a look in." I spent some time messing around with the SSHRC awards engine. His ...
Avon Barksdale: "If you would prefer that I not comment any further on the wci I will respect your wishes."
I think that would be best. Your interpretation of "challenge bluntly" is not in keeping with the tone here.
Why the USA Has A Trump and We Don’t (Yet...)
In the wake of the US presidential election and Donald Trump’s ascension to the mantle of “leader of the free world”, one is left pondering the factors that differentiate Canada from the United States. When I was a young boy and visited relatives in Italy, much to my confusion we were invariably...
But as a complement to Livio's point, I might point to this old post about contrasting trends in Canadian and US median incomes
Why the USA Has A Trump and We Don’t (Yet...)
In the wake of the US presidential election and Donald Trump’s ascension to the mantle of “leader of the free world”, one is left pondering the factors that differentiate Canada from the United States. When I was a young boy and visited relatives in Italy, much to my confusion we were invariably...
Avon: You are free to disagree with a point, and explain why. You are not, however, the editor of WCI, and we don't work for you. It it most definitely not your job to decide who can say what here.
Why the USA Has A Trump and We Don’t (Yet...)
In the wake of the US presidential election and Donald Trump’s ascension to the mantle of “leader of the free world”, one is left pondering the factors that differentiate Canada from the United States. When I was a young boy and visited relatives in Italy, much to my confusion we were invariably...
Hey, that's great! And thanks for pointing me to this *before* I started looking at annual data!
Another Foray into Data: New Macro-Financial Data
I think Stephen Gordon's Project Link and its piecing together of fragments of Statistics Canada data is a solid step in the right direction. If our national statistical agency is not going to provide long-term consistent data series, then I suppose its up to the researchers to lead the way. A...
Eric Gyhsels had a paper that remarked the same thing - start dates for recessions seemed to be concentrated in the fall. It was the basis for a lot of his work on seasonality. We're accustomed to stripping out the seasonal cycle, assuming that there's no information there about the business cycle; perhaps we shouldn't.
Is it Banking Crisis Season?
One really has to wonder if having the season move into “fall” is correlated with the fall of the financial sector. While some time in the making, the 2007-08 subprime financial crisis moved into crisis mode during August of 2007 and by early fall central banks had moved to lower discount rates ...
David - All I know from the SSHRC spreadsheets is that these areas had/have their own committees and budgets.
The economics of SSHRC research grants III: Research in Buzzword Studies
When SSHRC replaced the old Standard Research Grant (SRG) program with the Insight Grant (IG) program, it did more than simply increase the budget for research grants. It also introduced "priority research areas" (see Frances on this here) that would receive special attention. It turned out that...
Livio - Yes, that's really the issue, that the SSHRC grant program will fall into a death spiral. Low acceptance rates leading to people abandoning SSHRC completely.
Frances - Back in 2007 or so, I circulated a letter to econ department chairs making the point that according to SSHRC budgetary policies in force at the time, more money requested for economics projects automatically translated into a bigger economics budget. We could have hired undergrads to write up 6 pages of absolute crap, added a grotesquely-inflated budget and cashed in big time. I suspect that to some extent, this is still the case.
The economics of SSHRC research grants IV: A collective action problem
As irritating as it was, SSHRC's infatuation with Research in Buzzword Studies is not why Insight Grant (IG) success rates have stayed so low, even as the budget envelope has increased. The problem is the hard-won budgetary rigour that was established during the last years of the old Standard Re...
Bartbeaty - thanks. Given that it was coupled with Fine Arts in last year's competition, that's sort of what I was guessing.
The economics of SSHRC research grants III: Research in Buzzword Studies
When SSHRC replaced the old Standard Research Grant (SRG) program with the Insight Grant (IG) program, it did more than simply increase the budget for research grants. It also introduced "priority research areas" (see Frances on this here) that would receive special attention. It turned out that...
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