In this paper we show that the abundance of a natural resource such as oil need not present a curse for the domestic economy, dooming the non-oil sector to secondary status and a long period of stagnation and decline. Rather oil revenues can themselves be source of economy wide growth. What is...

This paper re-examines the relation between private economic performance and federal government size in Canada over the long 1870-2011 time period. The particular focus is on whether the effect of government size on private output has an inverted U shape with a tipping point. Its innovation is...

This paper asks why the governing party in a Westminster parliamentary system would ever surrender the right to choose the timing of the next election in favour of a fixed electoral cycle that precisely dates future elections. The analysis is directed at explaining Canada’s recent (2007)...

This paper argues that the ambiguous relationship found between government size and economic growth in the empirical growth literature can be attributed at least in part to the different time series characteristics of the two series. For most countries economic growth is stationary while...

Since its publication over 60 years ago, Keynes' General Theory of Employment, Interest and Prices (1936) has substantially influenced both macroeconomic theory and popular opinion about what governments can and should do. However, the extent to which counter-cyclical stabilization has actually...

This paper uses annual data from 1870 and 2000 in Canada to test whether overtly political variables interact with macroeconomic variables through government size. We begin by asking whether Canada’s macro data is consistent with political cycles, i.e., the hypothesis that macro cycles have...

We address the problem of how to investigate whether economics, or politics, or both, matter in the explanation of public policy. We first pose the problem in a particular context by uncovering a political business cycle (using Canadian data for 130 years) and by taking up the challenge to make...

This paper asks whether Canadian data is consistent with political opportunism, partisanship and/or political competition effects on real output growth since Confederation. Using data from the 1870 to 2005 time period, we find support for an electoral cycle only if actual election dates are...