The importance and complexity of petroleum and hard minerals operations is matched by the importance and complexity of finding effective ways to tax them. Many of these challenges arise in other activities too (exhaustibility of deposits being the main exception), but they take such extreme form...

In this paper, we characterize a mechanism for reducing pollution emissions in which countries, acting non-cooperatively, commit to match each others' abatement levels and may subsequently engage in emissions quota trading. The analysis shows that the mechanism leads to efficient outcomes. The...

Politicians typically do not know what policies are best for achieving their broad objectives, so rely on bureaucrats for advice. Bureaucrats are better informed, so can manipulate outcomes by proposing policies that suit their interests. We capture this conflict of interests using a model of...

The Canadian system of equalization is designed to address differences in revenue-raising capacity across provinces, basing a province's entitlements on its actual tax bases. However, since it does so on a year-on-year basis, the standard against which a given province's equalization...

We study the efficiency of credit market equilibria when financial intermediaries cannot observe the riskiness or the returns of potential investment projects. With loan financing, there is over-investment in high-return, high-risk projects and under-investment in low-return, low-risk projects...

This paper derives in the context of the Arrow and Kurz model decision rules for public investment which apply whether or not the economy is on the optimal path and for a wide variety of institutional constraints. The method is comparative dynamics. The net benefits of a change in public...

This paper studies optimal linear income taxation and redistributive social insurance when the former has the traditional labor distortion and the latter generates both ex ante and ex post moral hazard. Private insurance is available and individuals differ in labor productivity and in loss...

This paper presents a selective and non-technical survey of the role of intergovernmental equalization transfers as a device for achieving efficiency in the allocation of labor across regions in a decentralized nation, and for achieving fiscal equity among residents of various regions. We...

This paper investigates the effect of asymmetric information on the annuities market when individuals differ in the probability of dying. Individual behaviour under live-insured and term-insured annuities is investigated. Unlike well-known results of Rothschild and Stiglitz, if an equilibrium...

This paper analyzes corporate and personal income taxes and inflation on the cost of investing in depreciable and inventory capital in Canada in 1963-78. Changes in rates of inflation and corporate tax rates theoretically have an ambiguous effect on the cost of capital. Tax depreciation and FIFO...