Consumer confidence indices are often viewed as leading indicators of economic activity. In this paper, we investigate the role of these indices in forecasting output growth for the United States and Canada within an IS-curve framework. Our results show that in the case of the U.S. inclusion of...

This paper looks at the increasing trend around the world to evaluate the quantity and quality of universities’ research output. Evaluations can provide a useful role in clarifying the performance of university research, and give incentives to increase research output and quality because of...

There are numerous ways to specify monetary-policy reaction functions in economic models. In recent years, the practice of using the Taylor rule, or more generally, Taylor-type rules, as a monetary policy rule has become more wide spread in the economic literature. The structure of this rule is...

This paper quantifies both the persistence of low income spells in Canada and the likelihood of exiting and re-entering a low income spell. It assesses multiple spells of low income and takes into account observable socio-demographic characteristics as well as unobserved heterogeneity in...

This paper examines the past and future behaviour of the employment rate in Canada using an econometric model that is estimated using administrative data on specific age-sex cohorts. The cohort approach allows us to model explicitly the extent to which people of a given age participate more or...

This paper considers tradable emissions-permit schemes in four contexts. They are designed to uncover the advantages and disadvantages are of various permit-trading scenarios for Canada. Using a framework that allows us to fully account for the financial transactions that accompany permit...

In this paper, the authors examine how well the Hodrick-Prescott filter (HP) and the band-pass filter (BK) recently proposed by Baxter and King (1995) extract bysiness cycle frequencies for the level of macroeconomic time series.

This paper is a study of the federal tax treatment of the oil sands industry centred in Alberta. It includes a summary of the history of tax policy related to the oil sands industry in Canada, and presents the results of the Oil Sands Tax Expenditure Model (OSTEM) designed in the Business Income...

It is well known that over the next several decades, important demographic changes will occur in most industrialised countries. As the baby-boom generation reaches the age of retirement, the share of the population aged 65 and over will increase rapidly. There is a growing concern that the...

In this paper we examine the impact of technological change on unemployment and employment in Canada. We focus in particular on the argument that an increase in the pace of technological change has been responsible for Canada’s poor employment performance in the 1990s. We outline some economic...