Au Canada comme au Québec un dollar sur deux est dépensé par l'État. C'est une proportion considérable des dépenses totales d'une économie laissée à la décision du marché politique. Cette proportion est une des plus élevées parmi les pays dits capitalistes. Devant ce constat, les...

This paper investigates the work incentives aspect of the new tax credit called Prime au travail introduced by the Quebec government in January 2005. The problem of work incentives is discussed and a review of the literature pertaining to the American, English and French experiences in this...

This paper analyses a survey undertaken by the polling firm CROP between the 20th and the 31st of January 2005. The 21 questions presented in this study concern the Quebec population's perception of fiscal issues. Several issues are examined such as budgetary choices and fiscal administration as...

Statistical tests in vector autoregressive (VAR) models are typically based on large-sample approximations, involving the use of asymptotic distributions or bootstrap techniques. After documenting that such methods can be very misleading even with fairly large samples, especially when the number...

In this paper, we use identification-robust methods to assess the empirical adequacy of a New Keynesian Phillips Curve (NKPC) equation. We focus on the Gali and Gertler's (1999) specification, on both U.S. and Canadian data. Two variants of the model are studied: one based on a...

We construct a model to show that active financial intermediation can induce economic fluctuations. We embed a financial sector in a simple overlapping generation model with a single stock of capital. Individuals are risk averse agents that face idiosyncratic risks in their business activities:...

This paper characterizes the optimal insurance contract in an environment where an informed agent can misrepresent the state of the world to a principal who cannot credibly commit to an auditing strategy. Because the principal cannot commit, the optimal strategy of the agent is not to tell the...

This paper examines the role of institutions (including civil law origin), financial deepening and degree of regime authority on growth rates in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region using panel data through a fixed effect model. The results reveal that English civil law origin and...

This paper develops a general stochastic framework and an equilibrium asset pricing model that make clear how attitudes towards intertemporal substitution and risk matter for option pricing. In particular, we show under which statistical conditions option pricing formulas are not...

In this paper, we analyze hyper-return periods from 1976 to 1994 for 20 emerging stock markets. We define a hyper-return period as a calendar year during which a cumulative geometric return in excess of 70% is observed. According to this definition, the hyper-return periods represent 23% of the...