This paper examines the evolution of the returns to human capital in Canada over the period 1980-2006. Most of the analysis is based on Census data, and on weekly wage and salary earnings of full-time workers. Our main finding is that the returns to education increased substantially for Canadian...

Tang and Wang provided a decomposition of economy wide labour productivity into sectoral contribution effects. The present note reworks their methodology to provide a more transparent and simple decomposition. This new decomposition is then related to another decomposition due to Gini and...

I consider the role of conscription as a fiscal shock absorber in times of war. Conscription of military personnel allows the fiscal authority to minimize wartime government expenditure, and hence, minimize tax distortions associated with war finance. I develop a simple dynamic general...

This paper proposes several testing procedures for comparison of misspecified calibrated models. The proposed tests are of the Vuong-type (Vuong, 1989; Rivers and Vuong, 2002). In our framework, the econometrician selects values for model's parameters in order to match some characteristics of data...

In incomplete information environments with transferable utility, efficient outcomes are generally implementable unless interim or ex post participation constraints are imposed on the problem. In this paper we show that linking a sufficiently large number of independent but possibly unrelated...

This paper studies the bilateral contracting environment where multiple principals negotiate contracts with multiple agents independently. It is shown that equilibrium allocations associated with (pure strategy) perfect Bayesian equilibria relative to any ad hoc set of negotiation schemes can be...

We investigate equilibria of sealed-bid second price auctions with bidder participation costs in the independent private values environment. We focus on equilibria in which bidders use cut-off strategies (bid the valuation if it is greater than a certain cut-off point, otherwise do not...

We propose a quantile-based nonparametric approach to inference on the probability density function (PDF) of the private values in first-price sealed-bid auctions with independent private values. Our method of inference is based on a fully nonparametric kernel-based estimator of the quantiles...

We provide a new interpretation of mixed strategy equilibria that incorporates both von Neumann and Morgenstern's classical concealment role of mixing as well as the more recent Bayesian view originating with Harsanyi. For any two-person game, G, we consider an incomplete information game, IG,...

We explore the role of private information in bilateral matching and bargaining. Our model is a replica of Mortensen and Wright (2002), but with private information. A simple necessary and sufficient condition on the parameters of the model for existence of equilibrium with entry is obtained. As...