This paper develops a model of two person family. Each family member attempts to maximize his or her own utility. Yet they are interdependent in two respects. Family members are interdependent, first of all, because they care about each other. Second, there are local public goods or household...

Female employment rates in Russia have declined substantially since the end of the Soviet period. At the same time, there has been pronounced change in policies enabling women to balance work and family, or “familial policies.” The availability of child care has contracted sharply, and long...

The paper draws attention to the interdependence of regulation and taxation. We analyze the nature of policy equilibrium, as well as the implications of three historically important political and economic shocks, for the joint use of the two policy instruments in a framework that embodies...

We develop a North-South model of international trade and transboundary pollution to analyze the relationship between environmental technology transfer and the South's incentive to sign an international environmental agreement (IEA). First, we show that technology transfer could either increase...

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 contributes to the understanding of empirically-oriented work on the size of government by integrating the analysis of three basic elements: (i) the 'demand' for government stemming in part from attempts to coercively redistribute, often analyzed in a median voter framework; (ii) the...

In this paper we look at economic liberalization – both in the context of countries under transition from communism to capitalism, and in the context of developed market economies of North America and Western Europe. By “liberalization” we mean not just opening to external trade and...

This paper studies the response of a dominant domestic oligopoly to the reduction in the rate of a protective tariff. The issue here is whether the domestic market performance is improved through a movement toward free trade alone. Put another way, is free trade always a substitute for...