While National Health Insurance (NHI) plans in the U.S. are often opposed on the basis of their potential disemployment effects, there is no existing evidence on the effects of NHI on employment. We provide such evidence by examining the employment consequences of NHI in Canada, using the fact...

A large international literature has documented the labor market distortions associated with social security benefits for near-retirees. In this paper, we investigate the 'other side' of social security programs, seeking to document improvements in wellbeing arising from the provision of public...

The growing labor force participation of women with small children in both the U.S. and Canada has led to calls for increased public financing for childcare. The optimality of public financing depends on a host of factors, such as the "crowd-out" of existing childcare arrangements, the impact on...

We explore the fiscal implications of reforms to the Canadian retirement income system by decomposing the fiscal effect of reforms into two components. The mechanical effect captures the change in the government's budget assuming no behavioral response to the reform. The second component is the...

A central parameter for evaluating tax policies is the price elasticity of demand for cigarettes. But in many countries this parameter is difficult to estimate reliably due to widespread smuggling, which significantly biases estimates using legal sales data. An excellent example is Canada, where...

To measure how policy changes affect social welfare, economists typically look at how policies affect behavior, and use a formal model to infer welfare consequences from the behavioral responses. But when different models can map the same behavior to very different welfare impacts, it becomes...

Like most other developed nations, Canada has a large income security system for retirement that provides significant and widely varying disincentives to work at older ages. Empirical investigation of their effects has been hindered by lack of appropriate data. We provide an empirical analysis...

Government transfers to older persons in Canada are one of the largest and fastest growing" components of the government budget. I provide an overview of the interaction between these" transfer programs and retirement behavior. I begin by documenting historical trends in labor force"...

Disability Insurance (DI) is a public program that provides income support to persons unable to continue work due to disability. The difficulty of defining disability, however, has raised the possibility that this program may be subsidizing the early retirement of workers who are not truly...

I review the key issues that arise in financing health care delivery. I begin by documenting the key features of health care markets that make financing so central in this sector, such as the skewed and unpredictable nature of health care spending and market failures in health care delivery. I...