In Europe discussions about immigration policies have been wide-spread and heated ever since a flood of illegal immigrants have reached Europe’s shores and caused problems with labour markets, housing, fiscal, social and cultural institutions. Some commentators see the solution to some of...

One set of government statistics shows that the average incomes of Canadians in the lowest quintile of the distribution, the “poor”, remained constant during the period from 1990 to 2009. Another set of government statistics indicates that, over the same period, the “poor” enjoyed a 180%...

In 2011, we estimated that in 2005 Canada’s immigrant selection policies resulted in an average fiscal burden on taxpayers of $6,000 for each immigrant. Later that year, Mohsen Javdani and Krishna Pendakur from the economics department at Simon Fraser University (J&P hereafter) presented an...

In the 1970s the world experienced a serious economic crisis, which was widely attributed to the need to recycle petro dollars. In the 2000s the same need for recycling existed to an even greater degree because of large Chinese trade surpluses that added to those of petro producers.Some analysts...

This paper presents a new hierarchical methodology for estimating multi factor dynamic asset pricing models. The approach is loosely based on the sequential approach of Fama and MacBeth (1973). However, the hierarchical method uses very flexible bandwidth selection methods in kernel weighted...

The presence of long memory in Realized Volatility (RV) is a widespread stylized fact. The origins of long memory in RV have been attributed to jumps, structural breaks, non-linearities, or pure long memory. An important development has been the Heterogeneous Autoregressive (HAR) model and its...