Recent empirical studies examining the asymmetric effects of monetary shocks on economic activity do not systematically control for the non-monetary sources of fluctuations as well as the endogenous component of monetary policy. The evidence of asymmetry could simply reflect the failure to...

This paper presents estimates of the effects of family background, family income and parental work - especially maternal employment - on the behavioural development of young children. The particular outcomes analysed are children's scores on development-assessment instruments measuring cognitive...

It is often argued that risk-sharing employment relationships provide a better description of labour relations than the standard Walrasian framework. Such relationships have been introduced in macroeconomic models under an assumption of full commitment. In the absence of commitment, however,...

We test whether dynamic, stochastic, general equilibrium artificial economies associated with several labor market institutions provide an adequate characterization of aggregate employment volatility and dynamics. Our test is robust to possible misspecifications about the information set used by...

We consider a world in which a mobile polluting firm must locate in one of two regions. The regions differ in two dimensions: their marginal cost of pollution and the production cost of the firm. It is shown that under incomplete information on regional marginal costs of pollution, fiscal...

Simulation-based estimation methods have become more widely used in recent years. We propose a set of tests for structural change in models estimates via Simulated Method of Moments (see Duffie and Singleton (1993)). These tests extend the recent work of Andrews (1993) and Sowell (1996a, b)...

In this paper, I investigate the sustainability of optimal cooperative policies for the replenishment of a renewable resource shared by two countries. If the development of these nations constitutes a threat to the common stock, under what conditions can a social best (a Pareto optimum) be...

This study investigates the statistical connection between the parameters of the Canadian unemployment insurance system and the rate of social assistance in the Province of Quebec. It is based on an econometric analysis of the annual macroeconomic data of the last two decades and simulations...

In this study, we focus on several potential determinants of provincial social assistance rates: the unemployment rate, the UI wage replacement rate and eligibility rules, the SA benefit level, the minimum wage, and the average industrial wage. Specifically, we try to quantify their respective...

This paper studies a general-equilibrium model of a dynamic economy with menu costs. Each firm's productivity is exposed to idiosyncratic and aggregate productivity shocks around a trend, and the money supply to monetary shocks around a trend. All consumption, pricing, and production decisions...