The recent "Romanow" and "Kirby" inquiries into the Canadian health care system recommended a publicly funded catastrophic prescription drug insurance program to protect Canadians from potentially ruinous drug costs. While the Romanow commission was not specific about the nature of such a...

In 1988, marginal personal income tax rates changed in Canada, for some individuals by reasonably substantial amounts. This note examines a large sample of tax-filer data and finds little convincing evidence of any effect on contributions to Registered Retirement Saving Plans (RRSPs).

Canadian household prescription drug expenditures are studied using different years of the Statistics Canada Family Expenditure Survey. Master files are used, expanding the number of available years and permitting provincial rather than regional identifiers. Nonparametric Engel curves are...

This is a review article of three books that deal with the problems facing the U.S. Social Security system. One deals with the OASDI (Old- Age, Survivors and Disability Insurance) financial shortfall and proposes an alternative plan with both a tier one benefit and a tier two provision based on...

Federal tax reform in 1988 flattened the Canadian personal income tax schedule, changing the marginal tax rates for many individuals. Using methods similar to those applied by Auten and Carroll (1999) in the study of the effects of the 1986 U.S. Tax Reform Act, we estimate the responsiveness of...

About 6% of seniors in Canada have family incomes below the Low-Income Measure. (The Low-Income Measure is 50% of the median family income, adjusted for family size, and is a commonly used, if arbitrary, operational definition of relative poverty.) This is a low rate by international standards,...

The paper explores whether the responses to food deprivation questions on the longitudinal Canadian National Population Health Survey help explain the links between socio-economic status and health. Transitions in food deprivation status are correlated with changes in health status. While health...

Within the 65+ age group, the percentage of labour market income received by the top 1% of earners has increased from about 30% in 1982 to more than 60% in 2002. The trend is smooth, is roughly uniform across provinces and does not appear to have been accelerated by top marginal tax rate...

This paper presents new homogeneous series on top shares of income from 1920 to 2000 in Canada using personal income tax return data. Top income shares display a U-shaped pattern over the century, with a precipitous drop during World War II, followed by a slower decline until 1970. Since the...

Between 1970 and 1986 all Canadian provinces introduced some version of a prescription drug subsidy for those age 65 or over and since 1986, all the provinces have increased copayments or deductibles to some degree. Employing a first-order approximation to the welfare gains from a subsidy, we...