The Way Ahead

Canada is a prosperous country, but this prosperity is being stressed by demographics, pressures on the public purse, and low productivity growth. To maintain the nation's high quality of life, prosperity must increase while remaining sustainable. Combining Tom Brzustowski's extensive knowledge of government, industry, and academia, The Way Ahead, articulates a strategy for moving the Canadian economy towards higher-value products based on research and development, describing the practical steps government, industry and academia must take to improve things in the short term and prepare strategically for the long term. He recommends increasing productivity growth by embracing an economy based on innovation, prioritizing research and development, marketing Canadian products internationally, and encouraging entrepreneurial activities in all sectors. Ultimately, increasing prosperity will require a new level of understanding, strategic coherence, and mutual support between the private and public sectors in Canada, a challenge that the author feels Canada is prepared to and absolutely must face

Essays in the theory of contracts and organisations

This thesis contains three essays in the theory of contracts and organisations. The first chapter examines the role of information in shaping the incentives of a decision maker who cares about passing a threshold. We present a model which can be applied to the case of a young employee in an organisation with an ‘up-or-out’ promotion system. We solve for the optimal design of the informational environment in which such a young employee operates, with the objective of encouraging hard work. The optimal information structure generates outcomes such that the promotion is allocated as if the young employee received full information. However, the young employee does not benefit from the information he receives and remains exactly indifferent between receiving advice or not. The second chapter (co-authored with Alkis Georgiadis-Harris and Balazs Szentes) analyses the sale of a durable good by a seller who cannot make intertemporal commitments to a buyer with private valuation for the good. Motivated by smart contracts used in digital markets, we allow the seller to offer general dynamic contracts. The main result is that the seller’s expected payoff is bounded away from the lowest valuation, that is the Coase conjecture fails. The third chapter (co-authored with Francesco Caselli) develops a model of a dynamic economy in which production takes place in worker cooperatives. We formalise an equilibrium concept that applies to such an economy in an overlapping-generation environment. We illustrate its applicability under specific assumptions on preferences and technology. The cooperative economy follows a growth path qualitatively similar to the path followed by a capitalist economy, featuring gradual convergence to a steady state with constant output. However, the cooperative economy features a static inefficiency, in that, for a given aggregate capital stock, firm size is smaller than what a social planner would choose. On the other hand, the cooperative economy cannot be dynamically inefficient, and could accumulate capital at a rate that is higher or lower than the capitalist economy

Disentangling goods, labor and credit market frictions in three European economies

We build a flexible model with search frictions in three markets: credit, labor, and goods markets. We then apply this model (called CLG) to three different economies: a flexible, finance-driven economy (the UK), an economy with wage moderation (Germany), and an economy with structural rigidities (Spain). In the three countries, goods and credit market frictions play a dominant role in entry costs and account for 75% to 85% of total entry costs. In the goods market, adverse supply shocks are amplified through their propagation to the demand side, as they also imply income losses for consumers. This adds up to, at most, an additional 15% to 25% to the impact of the shocks. Finally, the speed of matching in the goods market and the credit market accounts for a small fraction of unemployment: Most of the variation in unemployment comes from the speed of matching in the labor market

radR: an open-source platform for acquiring and analysing data on biological targets observed by surveillance radar

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Radar has been used for decades to study movement of insects, birds and bats. In spite of this, there are few readily available software tools for the acquisition, storage and processing of such data. Program radR was developed to solve this problem.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Program radR is an open source software tool for the acquisition, storage and analysis of data from marine radars operating in surveillance mode. radR takes time series data with a two-dimensional spatial component as input from some source (typically a radar digitizing card) and extracts and retains information of biological relevance (i.e. moving targets). Low-level data processing is implemented in "C" code, but user-defined functions written in the "R" statistical programming language can be called at pre-defined steps in the calculations. Output data formats are designed to allow for future inclusion of additional data items without requiring change to C code. Two brands of radar digitizing card are currently supported as data sources. We also provide an overview of the basic considerations of setting up and running a biological radar study.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>Program radR provides a convenient, open source platform for the acquisition and analysis of radar data of biological targets.</p

Disentangling goods, labor, and credit market frictions in three European economies

We build a flexible model with search frictions in three markets: credit, labor, and goods markets. We then apply this model (called CLG) to three different economies: a flexible, finance-driven economy (the UK), an economy with wage moderation (Germany), and an economy with structural rigidities (Spain). In these three countries, goods and credit market frictions play a dominant role in entry costs and account for 75% to 85% of the total entry costs. In the goods market, adverse supply shocks are amplified through their propagation to the demand side, as they also imply income losses for consumers. This adds up to, at most, an additional 15% to 25% to the impact of the shocks. Finally, the speed of matching in the goods market and the credit market accounts for a small fraction of unemployment: most variation in unemployment comes from the speed of matching in the labor market