The paper analyzes the replacement of universal social programs with targeted social benefits. We define "universality" as separability of tax/transfer system in income and other non-monetary attributes, and introduce the concept of "parallel equity" - a requirement that like differences in...

This paper develops a model of two person family. Each family member attempts to maximize his or her own utility. Yet they are interdependent in two respects. Family members are interdependent, first of all, because they care about each other. Second, there are local public goods or household...

Canadian pensioners are now allowed to split income from an employer pension and, for people 65 and older, income from a registered retirement income fund, RRSP annuity and some other forms of annuitites. In this commentary I argue that pension income splitting has no efficiency benefits, while...

We use the Canadian Community Health Survey (CCHS) to explore the effects of marriage and cohabitation on gay, lesbian, bisexual and heterosexual individuals’ hours worked and full-time earnings. The CCHS is one of the largest national-level data sets containing both income and sexual...

Why pay child benefits to mothers? The "feminist" case for paying benefits to mothers rests on the idea that women may suffer if they have no independent access to economic resources. The "maternalist" case for targeting benefits to mothers rests on the idea that money paid to mothers is more...

Some people are more likely to be convicted of a crime than others. In this paper we explain why group characteristics, such as race or age, might influence individual probabilities of conviction. Our model is motivated by the simple observation that it is prohibitively costly to investigate...

The concept of public goods is confusing because it confounds three analytically distinct concepts: excludability, rivalry, and public finance. Pure public goods are of limited relevance as an explanation of government spending. To make matters worse, the broader policy community uses the term...