The aging of the population is expected to result in substantial increases in the costs of maintaining health care and pension programs, and that is a source of widespread concern. However, a proper assessment requires that attention be given to all categories of government expenditure,...

Background: Surveys of chronic health conditions provide information about prevalence but not about the incidence and the process of change within the population. Objective: We show how the “age dynamics” of chronic conditions ‐‐ the probabilities of contracting the conditions at...

OBJECTIVE: The paper explores the population effects of male preference stopping rules and of alternative combinations of fertility rates and male-biased birth sex ratios. METHODS: The “laboratory” is a closed, stable population with five age groups and a dynamic process represented by a...

Population aging is a problem common to many countries: an increasing proportion of retired people, a decreasing proportion of working age, and resultant downward pressure on national product per capita. We explore longer-run aspects of immigration as a policy instrument in this context. We...

In just over three decades all those born during the post-war baby boom will be 65 and older, and the fraction of the population ‘old’ will be far greater than previously experienced in Canada, or indeed in any modern industrial nation. That prospect has given rise to major concerns about...

Policy analysis frequently requires estimates of aggregate (or mean) consumer elasticities. However, estimates are often made incorrectly, based on elasticity calculations at mean income. We provide in this paper an overall integrated analytical framework that encompasses these biases and...

Given the fundamental goal of raising living standards in the longer term, much attention is paid to policies that can be expected to increase national saving. With respect to private saving, the mechanism is tax reform – a lower tax on interest income. The basic problem with this approach is...

This paper shows that differences between the predictions of an international real business cycle model with complete markets and the predictions of a model where agentscan only trade rsk-free bonds depend heavily on the calibrated values for the degree of persistence in productivity shocks, the...

We study taxation externalities in federations of benevolent governments. Where different hierarchical government levels tax the same base, one can observe two types of externalities: a horizontal externality, working among governments of the same level and leading to tax rates that are too low...

The duration of spells of lone motherhood has important consequences for the economic well being of the members of such families and the cost of social programs. We use a large sample of linked income tax records to estimate a competing risk model of the impact of welfare benefits, language...