Objectives: Recent studies suggest an ambiguous relationship between obesity and cigarette taxes. We employ Canadian data to evaluate the effects of cigarette taxes on smoking and obesity. Methods: We use a simple reduced form approach and exploit the significant cross-province differences that...

The Ontario government should scrap its peak-demand electricity-pricing program for large industrial electricity users in order to lower costs for Ontario households, according to a new C.D. Howe Institute report. In “Peak Power Problems: How Ontario's Industrial Electricity Pricing System...

We study the effect of the educational diversity of managers on the performance of team-managed mutual funds using a large sample of U.S. equity funds from 1994 to 2013. We consider diversity in terms of both final educational degree and field of educational specialization. We find that, in...

With Canada ending the legal prohibition of recreational marijuana as of October 17, 2018, governments across the country have been mobilizing to tackle the many policy challenges. But there has been a lack of policy discussion on whether supply from existing authorized producers will be...

A central parameter for evaluating tax policies is the price elasticity of demand for cigarettes. But in many countries this parameter is difficult to estimate reliably due to widespread smuggling, which significantly biases estimates using legal sales data. An excellent example is Canada, where...

We use the Lindberg-Levy central limit theorem (CLT), Tchebychev's inequality, Slutsky's theorem, and general rules for limiting distributions to demonstrate sufficient conditions under which the Student-t test statistic for the mean is asymptotically standard normal. Although there exist weaker...