This paper measures the changes in total tax incidence in Canada for selected years from 1951 to 1988. It presents the first set of time-consistent estimates of the effect of all Canadian taxes on the distribution of income in Canada. The methodology builds up a comprehensive measure of broad...

The paper evaluates the 1993 child tax benefit reforms using the Social Policy Simulation Model and Database (SPSD/M) developed by Statistics Canada. The paper argues that few of the benefits of the reform went to the poorest families. Instead, because of the interaction of the tax and benefit...

This paper examines how exposure to FDI affects Canadian indigenous plants‘ survival, through their economic linkages with FDI affiliates as competitors, input suppliers and customers. One unique feature of the paper is that it studies a country with extensive exposure to FDI, and relies on a...

How can a desire to cooperate in one-shot interactions survive, even though it gives a material disadvantage to its carrier? I analyze this issue using a one-shot public goods game between two altruistic individuals. Within a pair, the least altruistic individual is better off materially....

Recent work based on sticky price-wage estimated dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models suggests investment shocks are the most important drivers of post-World War II US business cycles. Consumption, however, typically falls after an investment shock. This finding sits oddly with...

We estimate a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model with several frictions and both unanticipated and news shocks, using quarterly US data from 1954-2004 and Bayesian methods. We find that unanticipated shocks dominate news shocks in accounting for the unconditional variance of...

The paper examines how the Balassa-Samuelson hypothesis is affected by a modern variation of the standard model that allows product differentiation (within the traded and nontraded goods sectors) with the number of firms determined exogenously or endogenously. The hypothesis is found to be...

Accordingto Hamilton’s(1964a, b) rule,a cost lyaction will be undertaken if its fitness cost to the actor falls short of the discounted benefit to the recipient,where the discount factor is Wright’s index of relatedness between the two. We propose a generalization of this rule,and show that...

This paper examines the regularity that business cycle peaks and federal elections often arise together in parliamentary democracies as it applies to Canadian data over the post Confederation time period (1870 onwards). Breaking the simultaneity of these two events and properly identifying...