Anticompetitive pricing practices have received a significant amount of attention during the past several years but the criminal provisions of the Competition Act addressing predatory pricing, price discrimination and price maintenance (the "Pricing Provisions") are seldom the subject of...

This paper examines the optimal specific tax/subsidy policy for a monopoly under multi-tier pricing. It shows, among others, that an increase in a specific tax on any tier will raise (reduce) the cumulative output of preceding (succeeding) tiers in the non-uniform scheme. In contrast, increasing...

A model is estimated for oligopolistic industries producing multiple outputs in short-run equilibrium. Outputs are sold domestically and exported, while capital is treated as a quasi-fixed factor. The model is applied to the Canadian nonelectrical machinery, electrical products and chemical...

Using data from the United States and Canada, we quantify consumers’ net pecuniary cost of using cash, credit cards, and debit cards for purchases across income cohorts. The net cost includes fees paid to financial institutions, rewards received from credit or debit card issuers, and the...

We introduce a new data set on over 230,000 monthly prices for 10 goods in 50 Canadian cities over the 40 year period from 1910 to 1950. This coupled with previously published price information from the late twentieth century allows us to present one of the first comprehensive views of nominal...

Do prices respond to macro shocks? Does the mere presence of international frontiers hinder trade? We revisit these questions by studying a dataset of online book prices for a number of US and Canadian retailers. We believe our dataset is well suited to this task for a number of reasons: (1)...

We estimate the price elasticity of water demand with household-level data, structurally modeling the piecewise-linear budget constraints imposed by increasing-block pricing. We develop a mathematical expression for the unconditional price elasticity of demand under increasing-block prices and...

Recently released data show downward trends for both the firm entry rate and the rate of new entrepreneurship since the early 1980s in Canada. This paper documents these trends and discusses potential explanations. A shift-share analysis suggests that changes to Canada's industrial and...