When I see an "asset" like bitcoin jump up 10% after months of big declines, I think "dead cat bounce".

Toronto, last Sunday after the big storm. These are two buildings in Yorkville, Toronto, maybe a block apart. I love Toronto.

Another important paper, now in print at AER: "Potential" and the Gender Promotion Gap 🎯Subjective assessments of employee "potential" account for about half the gender promotion gap. 🎯 This is despite fact that women go on to outperform their male colleagues. www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=...

Important paper alert, now in print at AER: "Gender Differences in Economics Seminars" 🎯 "Within a seminar series, women are interrupted more than men." 🎯 Women experience more "Interruptions that are negative in tenor or tone or cut off the presenter mid-sentence". www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=...

The cleanup in Toronto from last weekend's storm is not finished. It started well before the last few flakes had fallen, late on Sunday night.

With China's shrinking workforce, miniscule immigration, real estate bust, & focus on exports, we have echoes of Japan's economy in the late-80s. Selling EVs and solar panels & getting back IOUs in #$USD risks what Japan suffered; a bad trade - pennies on the $ when it is all said and done.

China has more than 100 EV makers, a result of a push by its leaders a decade ago to move into this strategic space. A classic over-reaction when the invisible hand of the market is slapped away in favor of central management. China was so promising 15 years ago, with that lighter touch, now gone.

The storm is hitting Toronto with impressive lake effect snowfall.

I have been reading about the excitement for Claude AI. This is starting to get real. Now we just need cheap energy to run all this stuff. The old days of running on caffeine and donuts are fading into the rear view. www.anthropic.com/news/acceler...

Among the treats Grand Cayman were blue iguanas, endemic to Grand Cayman. The Mastic trail was where we spotted this guy, as well as the West Indian woodpecker. Both were pretty fearless.

The weather in Toronto is very, well, Canadian right now. Remembering Grand Cayman, warm breezes, quiet nights. The beach in front of our retreat was swamped with plastic though, even some medical waste. There are beaches kept clean(er) on the island, and 7 mile was spotless.

The idea of letting Americans use their 401ks to make down payments on home purchases is terrible. Most people spend to the limit of their credit for a home, leading to over-investment, and when we encourage people to spend more, they will mostly push up home prices. Not solving affordability.

Occasionally I notice youtube photographers complaining about extenders for telephoto lenses. But telephoto lenses have a rear set of glass elements which spread the light out, just like extenders. A bad extender degrades quality, sure, just like a bad telephoto lens produces poor images.

We are deep into the academic econ and finance recruiting season, with schools starting to send out invitations for job talks (full day interview). A great, fairly new resource, free from strategic manipulation from job-seekers, lists most schools looking for recruits: www.aeaweb.org/econtrack/po...

Hey #Toronto, the @utoronto.ca medical bookstore appears to have over 3000 boxes of KN95 masks (20 masks/box) available for $0.01/box. Good time to stock up! www.uoftmedstore.com/catalog.sz?p... HT @cathycrowe.bsky.social who provides bookstore contact into here: bsky.app/profile/cath...

#ASSA2026 Proud of my student Elham Tabatabaei, on the job market, who was part of the AFA poster session with her great paper Mixed Messages by Firms’ Managers: An Exploration into the Strategic Use of Tonal Inconsistency across Managerial Financial Communications papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

#assa2026 Lots of interesting AI and LLM papers - these tools are opening up the quantification of qualitative information. “Mental models and … “ by Bastianello et al was a good example, using analysts valuation reports to find impacts from biases (and more). papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

Tomorrow my co-author Vicki Bogan will present our paper “Intergenerational Race-Based Trauma and Financial Market Participation” at #ASSA2026 in a session she is chairing: “Investigating Racial Inequality through Historical Data and Events” Sun. Jan. 4, 2:30-4:30 www.aeaweb.org/conference/2...,

Year-end round-ups have been unkind to crypto bros, with caveats like Wall Street has joined in lending legitimacy. But all that confirms is pros know how to make money off of rubes. Upsides? It is as likely to go up as down next year as crypto has no intrinsic value. Until it fades into obscurity.

Travelling today and reminded of the trouble people with food allergies have. I am celiac and, by choice, vegan (I should probably say plant-based to avoid haters - vegans are almost as hated as atheists). I can get gluten free meals and I can get vegan on AC but not both. Would it be so hard?

Thinking about the declining supply of movies for theatres, with Netflix, Apple, Disney, etc., not having an incentive to distribute. I think they will take equity stakes in theatre chains and have parallel releases with discounts for subscribers.

During this lull between Xmas and New Years I am reminded of the first few American Economic meetings I went to, an annual conference that was held between Xmas and New Year's until the 1990s, because it was cheaper and hey, what else do we have to do? Now we wait until the weekend after New Year's.

The city of Toronto is appointing a traffic czar to handle congestion. I am unsure why, as recent increases in congestion are by design, eliminating traffic lanes, making key east-west routes single lane or restricted to public transit. I thought the point was to encourage bicycling/public transit.

If you love photography, you will love this new youtube channel "The 20x24 Project" www.youtube.com/@PolaroidFou...

I am not making too much of this, but lately Berkshire-Hathaway's price has been negatively correlated with the market, at least to casual inspection; big moves in the market are mirror-imaged with opposite-signed BRK moves. Seems stronger than before Buffet announced his departure. Funny.

@markjkamstra.bsky.social Winter does bring remarkable sunsets.

Got ticketed for changing lanes without signaling. Dashcam recording shows my flashing turn signal. I hope that exonerates me. But who gets a ticket for this? The officer came in hot when he handed me the ticket, called me arrogant before I spoke, gave me a 5 minute lecture. 😑I know, could be worse.

A holy grail for agriculture: nitrogen-fixing crops. www.sciencedaily.com/releases/202...

A terrible headline in the WSJ (for Birders) "What’s Eating the Eagles?" which was followed by "Struggling Super Bowl Champ Is in a ‘Funk'" Panic followed by relief. (I am not a particular fan of American football).

Remembrance Day, Queen's Park Toronto. The soldiers represent lost souls from WWI, ghosts who don't interact with us but remain.

Toronto's Distillery District, with the annual holiday season celebration already in full swing. We thought we might have less trouble parking and smaller crowds last Sunday with the Grey Cup championship game on, but with the Argos on the sidelines, no such luck.

Mmm - fungus www.sciencedaily.com/releases/202...

Noticing Bitcoin's recent decline (so much volatility - what goes down must come up?). Wondering if the bubble is popping. That won't happen until people need cash for real things, or panic. Looking at Google Trends data on searches for bitcoin and "bitcoin crash" I don't see anything developing.

How does gender identity relate to pension plans? 0.33% of the Canadian population aged 15+ identified as transgender or non-binary in 2021. This article discusses implications for actuarial considerations like life expectancy and commuted value in pensions. www.benefitscanada.com/archives_/be...

In case you missed it, the recording of Meera Paleja's webinar, which I moderated, is now available. Topic: Enhancing the Investor Experience: A Behavioural Science Perspective youtu.be/_O1X90byftE?...

I ran the same Python program on two different PCs. Got mostly the same output (I generated random numbers to swap out an estimate, which vary every time the program runs, so it was not going to be identical) but 0.1% of the time it failed on one and not the other. I hate puzzles like this.

I don't know why we have so many bushes and grasses growing on rooftops and gutters in the neighborhood, but here is the proof. Most weirdly, the bush/tree on the roof below us was dug up, roots exposed, then repotted. Is this a "green" roof initiative? I kid, but someone help me understand this.

Enjoyed another lovely sunset, fall colours and a Halloween vibe. Now about to watch the bottom of the ninth, Blue Jays down but not out.

I'm not even a ball fan, but here I am watching the 16th inning of a game famously designed for 9.

It was a good day to do the CN Tower Edge walk. It was a better day to be in my apartment and photograph other people dangling over 1,100 feet above the hard, hard ground.

An annual tradition in Toronto is lighting up the CN Tower with jack-o'-lanterns come October.

I think that we need to add project management to b-school curriculums as required, second year courses. Or maybe high school. Or develop really good AI assistants.

I just found out (thanks to a JEL review of The Silver Empire) that Richard Thaler, 2017 Nobel Prize in Economics, has a family name appropriately steeped in numismatic history. Thalers were silver coins minted in Europe from which the name dollar evolved from. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dollar

On the corner of Yorkville Ave and Avenue Rd sits a long delayed construction project, now humming with activity. I caught it on a quiet day, and I was startled by the tangle of plastic piping being threaded through the steel rebar of the parking garage.

“Within a seminar series, women are interrupted more than men. This holds when controlling for characteristics of the presenter, paper, and audience. Interruptions that are negative in tenor or tone, or cutoff the presenter mid-sentence, increase for women presenters.”

🚨 Call for abstracts 🚨 Animal Welfare Economics Conference 2026 🐷🐮🐥🐟🐾 University of Chicago, June 29-30, 2026 Submission deadline: January 15, 2026 Submission link: subscribepage.io/abstract-sub... #EconConf

At the Kroner Center for Financial Research we invite proposals for up to $75K in funding for projects on any of three topics: inflation/stagflation hedging, digitization/tokenization in pension fund asset allocation, or the role of AI in strategic asset allocation. www.ssrn.com/index.cfm/en...

Fall is creeping up on us, the nights are getting longer, the breezes getting more and more crisp.

Reading articles asking "where are the productivity gains from AI?" I flashback to pretty much every tech revolution. At first people sort out how to use the tech. My wife working at IBM in the 80s had a manager dictating memos for her to type into a PC. He probably never learned how to use a PC.

Watched Eugene Levy's Reluctant Traveler RV trip to New Orleans. Crayfish were featured, taking me back to my days at the Atlanta Fed. Our president had a soft spot for "crawfish". Flights from NO to Atlanta delivered checks & on occasion a bag of crawfish appeared in the president's office.