Is there evidence that households adjust their asset portfolios just prior to retirement in response to a means-tested public pension? We address this question by estimating a system of asset equations constrained to add up to net worth. We find little evidence that in 2006 healthy households or...

Identifying the effect of differential taxation on portfolio allocation requires exogenous variation in marginal tax rates. Marginal tax rates vary with income, but income surely affects portfolio choice directly. In systems of individual taxation – like Canada’s – couples with the same...

Identifying the effect of differential taxation on portfolio allocation requires exogenous variation in marginal tax rates. Marginal tax rates vary with income, but income surely affects portfolio choice directly. In systems of individual taxation – like Canada’s – couples with the same...

This research attempts to figure out whether the wage distributions of Canadian wage earners have been moving towards or away from the flowing three ideals in the early part of the 21th century. First, there be a pattern of wage increase that is shared by a large majority of wage earners....

According to Canadian taxfiler data, over the last thirty years there has been a surge in the income shares of the top 1%, top 0.1% and top 0.01% of income recipients, even with longitudinal smoothing by individual using three- or five-year moving averages. Top shares fell in 2008 and 2009, but...

This paper investigates the responsiveness of household portfolios to tax incentives by exploiting a substantial tax reform that altered after-tax returns and cost of debt for a large number of households. An extraordinary panel data set that covers two years before and after the reform is used...

The first-order condition (FOC) associated with labour in many dynamic general equilibrium models involves only current period variables. Residuals constructed from this FOC are inconsistent with aggregate US data in that they are very large and highly persistent. The persistence suggests that...

This paper explores the ability of a large set of RBC type models to explain aggregate US data by examining how well the rst-order conditions (FOCs) from each model t the data. Typically, the residuals from the FOC for hours worked are large in magnitude (more volatile than total hours), very...

An important demographic trend is the aging of the population. As a result, demand for health care services for the sick and elderly is likely to increase. Since care for the sick and elderly is often provided informally by family members, parental illness may have important implications for the...

The family investment hypothesis predicts that credit-constrained immigrant families adopt a household strategy for financing post-migration human capital investment in which the “primary worker” engages in investment activities and the other partner undertakes labor market activities which...