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.

Dang. I meant to add that point and forgot.

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.

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.

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I apologize for wasting your time.

Thanks *so* much for the reference! Already downloaded!

This is really good stuff, Frances.

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.

The flows are July 1 to July 1, so the last observation would have been almost exactly when oil prices stared to fall.

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.

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.

That's a good point - I cover Bretton Woods right after, so I'll talk about it then.

Great find! I'm *definitely* adding this to my lecture notes on the gold standard.

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.

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.

But as a complement to Livio's point, I might point to this old post about contrasting trends in Canadian and US median incomes

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.

Hey, that's great! And thanks for pointing me to this *before* I started looking at annual data!

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.

David - All I know from the SSHRC spreadsheets is that these areas had/have their own committees and budgets.

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.

Bartbeaty - thanks. Given that it was coupled with Fine Arts in last year's competition, that's sort of what I was guessing.

The last one.

That's quite enough attitude, thank you.