There are no other two countries in the world that trade as much between themselves as do Canada and the U.S.. It should thus come as no surprise that the U.S. deviation from international obligations makes Canadian industries' competitiveness (trade) concerns become even more rigorous. Against...

In many areas of the world, including large parts of the United States, scarce water supplies are a serious resource and environmental concern. The possibility exists that water is being used at rates that exceed what would be dictated by efficiency criteria, particularly when externalities are...

Government student loan programs must balance the need to enforce repayment among borrowers who can afford to make their payments with some form of forgiveness or repayment assistance for those who cannot. Using unique survey and administrative data from the Canada Student Loan Program, we show...

The use of payment cards, either debit or credit, is becoming more and more widespread in developed economies. Nevertheless, the use of cash remains significant. We hypothesize that the lack of card acceptance at the point of sale is a key reason why cash continues to play an important role. We...

This paper analyzes the stabilizing properties of alternative monetary policy regimes. In practice there is a choice between two broad types of monetary policy regimes: a fixed exchange rate regime or a floating exchange rate regime. In this paper I compare exchange rate targeting with different...

We examine the evolution of monetary policy rules in a group of inflation targeting countries (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Sweden and the United Kingdom), applying a moment-based estimator in a time-varying parameter model with endogenous regressors. Using this novel flexible framework, our...

This paper investigates the role of monetary policy in a small open economy, where exchange rate shocks are important. VAR models are estimated for the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland. Contemporaneous and sign restrictions are imposed in order to identify the effect of monetary policy and...

In Deutschland steht wieder einmal eine große Steuerreform an. Zum Jahresbeginn 2001 soll das Steuersenkungsgesetz in Kraft treten, in dessen Zentrum grundlegende Änderungen bei der Einkommens- und Unternehmensbesteuerung stehen. Diese Steuerreform ist oft mit einer im internationalen...