In this paper we re-examine the case for Indirect Convertibility made by Greenfield and Yeager (1983, 1989) as a mechanism for promoting greater internal price level stability. We argue that with some reinterpretation, indirect convertibility can be interpreted as a convenient, practical...

This article argues that policy in relation to education has relied too extensively on the more easily measured costs of production to support a common conclusion of economies of scale in school and/or district size. It argues that there are external costs that increase with size but that can be...

In this paper we show that the abundance of a natural resource such as oil need not present a curse for the domestic economy, dooming the non-oil sector to secondary status and a long period of stagnation and decline. Rather oil revenues can themselves be source of economy wide growth. What is...

This paper re-examines the relation between private economic performance and federal government size in Canada over the long 1870-2011 time period. The particular focus is on whether the effect of government size on private output has an inverted U shape with a tipping point. Its innovation is...

This paper asks why the governing party in a Westminster parliamentary system would ever surrender the right to choose the timing of the next election in favour of a fixed electoral cycle that precisely dates future elections. The analysis is directed at explaining Canada’s recent (2007)...

This paper asks whether comprehensive, non-interest government size has an inverted Ushaped effect on private economic output in Canada and whether its current size is too large relative to the estimated tipping point. Using data from 1929 through 2011 and controlling for both correlations...

While it is clear that Keynes' General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936) has influenced macroeconomic theory, the extent to which his ideas about countercyclical stabilization have altered the course of public policy remains an open question. We develop a dynamic spatial voting...