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...

We study the transmission of risk attititudes in a unique survey of mothers and children in which both participated in an incentivised risk preference elicitation task. We document that risk preferences are correlated between mothers and children when the children are just 7 to 8 years old. This...

Identifying the effect of differential taxation on portfolio allocation requires exogenous variation in marginal tax rates. Marginal tax rates vary with income, but income surely affects portfolio choice directly. In systems of individual taxation - like Canada's - couples with the same...

First order conditions from the dynamic optimization problems of consumers and firms are important tools in empirical macroeconomics. When estimated on micro-data these equations are typically linearized so standard IV or GMM methods can be employed to deal with the measurement error that is...

We study the transmission of risk attitudes in a unique survey of mothers and children in which both participated in an incentivized risk preference elicitation task. We document that risk preferences are correlated between mothers and children when the children are just 7 to 8 years old. This...

This paper is an attempt to answer the long standing question of whether more affluent households save a larger fraction of their income. The major difficulty in empirically assessing the relationship between incomes and saving rates is to construct a credible proxy for long-run income - purged...

Identifying the effect of differential taxation on portfolio allocation requires exogenous variation in marginal tax rates. Marginal tax rates vary with income, but income surely affects portfolio choice directly. In systems of individual taxation - like Canada's - couples with the same...

What effect does rising income inequality have on longevity in advanced developed economies? This paper focuses on the effect of income inequality on mortality rates for men and women in a subset of OECD countries over nearly six decades from 1950-2008. Using adult mortality rates at aged...

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...

Suppose an agency awards a fixed number of prizes to applicants in different categories such that the applicant-to-winner ratio is constant by category. It is demonstrated in a simple theoretical model that the number of awards in a category will typically be positively related to the degree of...