The kinds of goods that richer and poorer households consumed differed more strongly in the past than today. Movements in the relative prices of luxury goods versus staples caused the real inequality to oscillate in ways missed by the usual historiography of (nominal) inequality. On both sides...

The regulation of the Canadian dairy and poultry industries through production quotas (also known as supply management) is widely believed to result in higher consumer prices that disproportionately impact poorer households. Using the most recent Survey of Labor and Income Dynamics (2011), we...

From the 19th century to the 1940's, Quebec remained poorer and less economically developed than the rest of Canada in general and poorer than Ontario in particular. This placed Quebec at the bottom of North American rankings of living standards. One prominent hypothesis for the initiation of...

The British Conquest of Quebec in 1760 was a key moment in Canadian history as it marked the beginning of a tense coexistence between French and English Canadians. Many argue that the Conquest had strong economic consequences in the form of the relative poverty of the French settlers. The...