In Nash equilibrium, agents are autarchic in their optimization protocol, whereas in Kantian equilibrium, they optimize in an interdependent way. Typically, researchers into the evolution of homo economicus treat preferences as being determined by selective adaptation, but hold fixed the...

While Murphy, Zhang & Dionne (2012) report a slight decrease in the average duration of poverty spells in Canada over the past decade, little is understood about the factors associated with poverty duration in Canada, nor which factors, if any, may affect women and men differently. Moreover,...

We compare the returns to education between graduates of post secondary institutions who delayed their tertiary education for some time and those that proceeded with no delays. Using a unique survey that collects information on a representative cohort of graduates, we are able to estimate the...

Electoral systems promote strategic voting and aect party systems. Duverger (1951) proposed that plurality rule leads to bi-partyism and proportional representation leads to multi-partyism. We show that in a dynamic setting, these static eects also lead to a higher option value for existing...

The development of the welfare state in the Western economies between 1930 and 1990 coincided with a puzzling pattern in the taxation of top incomes. Effective tax rates at the top increased sharply but then gradually decreased, even as social transfers continued rising. We propose a new theory...

We illustrate the contrast between two sources of intergenerational disagreement when generations are overlapping and governments aggregate preferences in a utilitarian manner. Social preferences tend to exhibit a present-bias because generations are imperfectly altruistic about future...

This paper studies the symmetric equilibria of a two-buyer, two-seller model of directed search in which sellers commit to information provision. More informed buyers have better differentiated private valuations and extract higher rents from trade.When sellers cannot commit to sale mechanisms,...

A fundamental challenge in informing employer-employee agency problems is measuring employee shirking activity. We identify the propensity of employees to misreport health in order to exploit favorable weather by linking Canadian weather data and survey data on short-term spells of sickness...

This paper develops a simple alternative estimation method for the GARCH models based on the empirical characteristic function. A set of Monte Carlo experiments is carried out to assess the performance of the proposed estimator. The results reveal that the proposed estimator has good finite...