This paper studies loan activity in a context where banks must follow Basel Accord-type rules and acquire financing from households. Loan activity typically decreases when entrepreneurs' investment returns decline, and we study which type of policy could revigorate an economy in a trough. We...

More females than males have been attending Canadian universities over the past decade and this gender imbalance in university participation has been increasing. We use the Linear Probability and Logit models to investigate the determinants of attending university and explore the reasons for the...

A simple theory suggests that a common form of federal horizontal equalization grants should cause subnational governments to levy higher tax rates, distorting local tax bases and so increasing federal transfers. To test this, I examine Canadian provincial tax policies in the 1972-2002 period....

We address the problem of how to investigate whether economics, or politics, or both, matter in the explanation of public policy. The problem is first posed in a particular context by uncovering a political business cycle (using Canadian data for 130 years) and by taking up the challenge to make...

We process information in a large number of wage contracts, signed over a period of several decades, to generate the long-run history of the real wage for each bargaining pair. We term these hitherto unexamined histories 'chronologies'. We are able to generate 1574 continuous real wage...