By Christopher Cotton, Queen’s University
The Globe and Mail recently published an article arguing that it is undemocratic for Americans to move to Canada if Donald Trump is elected president. In the article, Jonathan Zimmerman, a history of education professor, argues that saying you’ll move to Canada if Trump wins is like saying democracy is “only a good thing if your side comes out on top,” akin to Trump accepting the outcome of the election only if he wins.Read More »
By Alex Chernoff, Senior Economist at the Bank of Canada
At the 2016 Canadian Economic Association meetings, Alex Chernoff received the 2015 Robert Mundell Prize for his work on dairy quotas and price regulation. Alex was a Queen’s doctoral candidate and JDI Student Fellow at the time; Dr. Chernoff is now a Senior Economist at the Bank of Canada. Here, he summarizes his contribution. Note that the views in this paper are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Bank of Canada.Read More »
By Wenbo Zhu, JDI Student Fellow, Queen’s University
Some technological advancements are skill-complementing, meaning that they tend to increase the productivity and demand for skilled workers. Other technological advancements are skill-replacing, meaning that they tend to reduce the demand for skilled workers and raise the productivity and demand for unskilled workers. Electronic computers are typically considered a prime example of skill-complementing technologies, whereas assembly lines and the use of interchangeable parts in the manufacturing industry are classic examples of skill-replacing technologies.
Disentangling the impacts of each type of technology is important for understanding of the impact of technological changes on labor markets. Read More »
In a new NBER working paper, Debraj Ray (Columbia) and Arthur Robson (Simon Fraser) propose an alternative to the standard practice in economics of listing coauthors in alphabetical order. Let’s start randomly assigning coauthor order. Queen’s economist Christopher Cotton discusses this proposal.Read More »
By Beverly Lapham, Queen’s University
Researchers and policymakers have long recognized that firms within an industry differ along many dimensions (size, productivity, participation in international markets, etc.). However, firm-level empirical analysis and rigorous theoretical models with firm heterogeneity have only been developed in the last fifteen years or so. Such analyses improve our understanding of how these differences affect firms’ performance in global and domestic markets and their responses to trade liberalization.Read More »
By Mario Crucini, Vanderbilt University, and Gregor Smith, Queen’s University
By Michal Ksawery Popiel, JDI Student Fellow, Queen’s University
In normal times, the Bank of Canada stimulates the economy by lowering the target for the overnight interest rate, encouraging borrowing and spending. However, interest rate movements are restricted below by an effective lower bound (ELB) — a point at which investors would withdraw their money from banks because they prefer to hold cash for a return of 0 percent. Once it is reached, central banks must turn to other, unconventional measures to influence economic conditions.Read More »
Zooming-in without losing focus – understanding regional recessions and the importance of spatial interactions
By Sergei Shibaev, JDI Student Fellow, Queen’s University
Here is the scenario – you are an interested party (e.g. regional policy maker or researcher) in a small regional division in Canada (e.g. Central Okanagan Regional District of British Columbia). You need to know if your region is likely to become economically at-risk or potentially distressed separately from the national economy, and to do so you require an informative assessment of any synchronicities (i.e. co-movements) with other regions in the country regarding how your small region’s economy has evolved in the last decade. Furthermore, you have existing knowledge regarding several types of connections to other regions that you know are important for your local economy (e.g. your largest regional trading partners), and you wish to explore and compare them through time. I develop and investigate a tool that is capable of learning by itself about these types of phenomena in a unified framework that collectively models a large number of small regions in a country.Read More »
By Thorsten Koeppl, Queen’s University
The better way to use mortgage insurance is to use the existing system, but price the risks appropriately. There is currently no deductible on mortgage default losses, but the pricing of insurance does not fully consider the idiosyncratic default risk of the mortgage either. Risk-based premiums would increase the cost of the mortgages that add more risk to the housing system, since insurance costs for high risk mortgages are passed on by lenders to borrowers. Moreover, the government backstops mortgage insurers. A step in the right direction is to start charging a premium for this backstop to mortgage insurers up front, in order to pass on the potential cost of an extreme housing crisis to the mortgage industry. Notwithstanding, the premiums that are currently charged seem to grossly underestimate these costs.
Read the full post at the C.D. Howe Institute
By Christopher Cotton, Queen’s University
Earlier this year, the government of Ontario was involved in a campaign finance scandal, accused of selling access to ministers in exchange for campaign donations. Most people see the exchange of contributions for access to politicians as obvious evidence of corruption. But, this view is too simple. Much of my academic research has focused on how special interests influence policy making. This research has led to a number of insights.Read More »
Economics and Policy 