We in vestigate the extent of the impact that direct tax subsidies (the "push" effect) and the competitiveness of the production tax system (the "pull" effect) have on research and development. A panel dataset of nine countries over nineteen years is used to estimate a dynamic fixed effects...

The authors model a firm that explores, develops, and extracts a depletable asset, taking into account various features of Canadian corporate and Ontario and Quebec mining tax law. They derive the user cost of capital and effective tax rate for investments undertaken by a mining firm....

We employ a methodology that distinguishes between discretionary and non-discretionary changes in provincial and federal fiscal policy. We find substantial variation in the discretionary policy of Canadian governments, across both time and jurisdictions. We uncover a marked asymmetry in the...

This paper documents the variation in effective tax rates for R&D in Canada's ten provinces. It is shown that while a sizable tax subsidy for R&D exists in every province, the variation across provinces is significant, ranging from an effective subsidy rate of about 40 percent in Alberta to over...

We revisit the 'excess subsidy' granted to the CPR for the first transcontinental railway in 1881. Previous studies have evaluated the subsidy from an ex post perspective, and concluded that it was 'too large.' We argue that the subsidy should be evaluated from an ex ante perspective, which...

The implications of risk and irreversibility for the measurement of marginal effective tax rates on capital are examined. It is shown that, when capital is irreversible, the marginal effective tax rate is an increasing function of systematic and unsystematic capital and income risk. The tax...

The 1986 Canadian federal budget, which increased the tax rate on dividends vis-a-vis capital gains, provides a natural experiment for examining the relationship between taxation and asset values. The authors employ a stock market event study to investigate the differential impact of this tax...