Science and technology improves human health but the pressure for faster and larger improvements is building with the continued ageing of the population of many OECD countries and the associated increased demands for health care. A fundamental starting point for better understanding of the...

In response to growing demand by policy-makers, various measures to assess tax burdens of households, individual firms and the business sector as a whole have been developed. This study reviews some of the most common measures used to gauge tax burdens of households and corporations. In...

Proceedings of the Ottawa Conference, November 2001. How can we measure the performance of different health systems, and how can we use such information to support on-going health systems improvement? Those are the central questions addressed in this volume. Health policy makers have a growing...

National Time Accounting is a way of measuring society's well-being, based on time use. Its explicit form is the U-index, for "unpleasant" or "undesirable", which measures the proportion of time an individual spends in an unpleasant state. In this paper I review cross-country evidence on...

Based on the recent trade models of the Heterogeneous Firms Trade (HFT) model and the Quality Heterogeneous Firms Trade (QHFT) model, we classify export goods (at the HS 6-digit level of disaggregation) by quality and price competition. We find a high proportions of quality-competition goods for...

Are structural models getting closer to being able to forecast exchange rates at short horizons? Here we argue that misinterpretation of some new out-of-sample tests for nested models, over-reliance on asymptotic test statistics, and failure to sufficiently check robustness to alternative time...

The real exchange rate (RER) has been called the single most important price, yet its behavior exhibits several puzzles. In this project, we use Big Mac prices as a unique prism to study the movement of real exchange rates. Part of our innovation is to match these prices to the prices of...