This paper has two goals. First, we discuss several emerging approaches to applied welfare analysis under non-standard ("behavioral") assumptions concerning consumer choice. This provides a foundation for Behavioral Public Economics. Second, we illustrate applications of these approaches by...

This paper documents the life-cycle patterns of household portfolios in Canada, and investigates several hypotheses about asset accumulation and allocation. Inferences are drawn from the 1999 Survey of Financial Security, with some comparisons to earlier wealth surveys from 1977 and 1984. I find...

The persistence of high savings-investment correlations and home-country bias in portfolio construction at the national level is contrasted with new evidence of savings behaviour in Canadian provinces. We confirm that national borders clearly divert flows of capital to domestic investments, but...

This paper revises pre-World War II current account data for thirteen countries by treating gold flows on a consistent basis. The standard historical data sources often fail to distinguish between monetary gold exports, which are capital-account credits, and nonmonetary gold exports, which are...

In comparing Canada with the U.S., we first simulate the U.S. demographic transition, treating the U.S. as a closed economy. The time path of interest rates obtained from the U.S. simulations are then used in the Canadian simulations. In the Canada simulations, Canada is assumed to be an open...

Recent theoretical research in open-economy macroeconomics has emphasized the connection between a country's current account and the intertemporal savings and investment choices of its households, firms, and governments. In this paper, we assess the empirical relevance of the permanent income...

Using unique survey and administrative data from the Canada Student Loans Program, we document that parental support and personal savings substantially lower student loan repayment problems. We develop a theoretical model for studying student borrowing and repayment in the presence of risky...

Financial literacy and Canadians' capacity to plan for retirement is of primary importance for the policy debate over pension system reform in Canada. In this paper, we draw on internationally comparable survey evidence on financial literacy and retirement planning in Canada to investigate how...

Annuities, long-term care insurance and reverse mortgages remain unpopular to manage longevity, medical and housing price risks after retirement. We analyze low demand using a life-cycle model structurally estimated with a unique stated-preference survey experiment of Canadian households. Low...