Economists have long advised pricing electricity at marginal cost. In the case of public utilities producing from hydraulic sources, this would ordinarily generate a rent that could be used to finance public projects or to lower taxes. But marginal cost pricing by public utilities is rarely...

A wide range of tests for heteroskedasticity have been proposed in the econometric and statistics literature. Although a few exact homoskedasticity tests are available, the commonly employed procedures are quite generally based on asymptotic approximations which may not provide good size control...

Vertical integration occurs when a transaction between two consecutive stages of production is carried through an internal organisation rather than the market. For most mineral products that are found in Canada, we can observe a fairly high degree of vertical integration from exploration up to...

Hydro-Quebec's electricity rates within its mandated territory increased at the annual rate of 3.8% from 1980 to 1990 despite the fact that there was no growth in the first three years. The government-owned enterprise is rather pessimistic with respect to the expected electricity demand growth...

This paper surveys the changes since 1972 in the federal tax laws applicable to the Canadian mining industry. Using a partial equilibrium model, we analyse the effect of these changes on the relative prices of the factors of production used by the mining firm. Changes in the provincial tax...

We study the dynamic behaviour of household electricity consumption on the basis of four large independent surveys conducted in the province of Québec from 1989 to 2002. The latter region displays some rather unique features such as the very extensive use of electricity for space heating in a...