This is a study of the relationship between the timing of social welfare payments and the price of food for one neighbourhood in Montreal. Using prices of 31 grocery products over 26 weeks and across seven stores, we obtain two main results. First, we show that the availability of social welfare...

Modern public economic theory emphasizes imperfect information as the ultimate constraint on redistribution policy: the needy are hard to identify. To target transfers efficiently, the standard tax-transfer system with its reliance on self-reporting needs to be supplemented by other devices...

The Canadian system of equalization is designed to address differences in revenue-raising capacity across provinces, basing a province's annual entitlements on its actual tax bases. However, the standard against which a given province's equalization entitlements are calculated fluctuates from...