This paper examines income inequality over stages of the later-life course (age 45 and older) and systems that can be used to mitigate this inequality. Two hypotheses are tested: (i) Levels of income inequality decline during old age because public benefits are more equally distributed than work...

Household expenditure data is an important input into the study of consumption and savings behaviour and of living standards and inequality. Because it is collected in many surveys, food expenditure data has formed the basis of much work in these areas. Recently, there has been considerable...

Background: There is compelling evidence of an inverse relationship between level of education and increased mortality. In contrast to this, one study showed that among subjects with Alzheimer's Disease, those with high education are more than twice as likely to die earlier; however, this result...

This paper presents new homogeneous series on top shares of income from 1920 to 2000 in Canada using personal income tax return data. Top income shares display a U-shaped pattern over the century, with a precipitous drop during World War II, followed by a slower decline until 1970. Since the...

Contributions to tax-preferred savings accounts are typically constrained by a contribution limit. These limits influence contributions not just in periods in which they bind, but in other periods as well. I develop a simple life-cycle model in which consumers exhibit "use-it-or-lose-it"...

An intensely debated question in the lifecycle literature is whether housing wealth is viewed by households as a financial asset that will be used to support general consumption after retirement. This paper uses the newly available longitudinal Canadian Survey of Labour and Income Dynamics...

Methods for time series modeling of mortality and stochastic forecasting of life expectancies are explored, using Canadian data. Consideration is given first to alternative indexes of aggregate mortality. Age-sex group system models are then estimated. Issues in the forecasting of life...

Federal tax reform in 1988 flattened the Canadian personal income tax schedule, changing the marginal tax rates for many individuals. Using methods similar to those applied by Auten and Carroll (1999) in the study of the effects of the 1986 U.S. Tax Reform Act, we estimate the responsiveness of...

Several estimators have been suggested to tackle the problem of endogenous regressors and selectivity in count regression models. They differ in the structure and the degree of parametrization of the underlying models. The estimation of health services utilization conditional on the choice of...

This paper uses a time-series of cross-sections drawn from three different surveys to explore life-cycle profiles of housing arrangements in Canada. Synthetic cohort (quasi-panel) methods are employed to disentangle age profiles from cohort effects. The results suggest limited "downsizing" in...