The paper explores whether the responses to food deprivation questions on the longitudinal Canadian National Population Health Survey help explain the links between socio-economic status and health. Transitions in food deprivation status are correlated with changes in health status. While health...

According to Canadian taxfiler data, over the last thirty years there has been a surge in the income shares of the top 1%, top 0.1% and top 0.01% of income recipients, even with longitudinal smoothing by individual using three- or five-year moving averages. Top shares fell in 2008 and 2009, but...

Suppose an agency awards a …xed number of prizes to applicants in different categories such that the applicant-to-winner ratio is constant by category. It is demonstrated in a simple theoretical model that the number of awards in a category will typically be positively related to the degree of...

In 1988, marginal personal income tax rates changed in Canada, for some individuals by reasonably substantial amounts. This note examines a large sample of tax-filer data and finds little convincing evidence of any effect on contributions to Registered Retirement Saving Plans (RRSPs).

Within the 65+ age group, the percentage of labour market income received by the top 1% of earners has increased from about 30% in 1982 to more than 60% in 2002. The trend is smooth, is roughly uniform across provinces and does not appear to have been accelerated by top marginal tax rate...

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...

Several explanations for the observed limited stock market participation have been offered in the literature. One of the most promising one is the presence of market frictions mostly in the form of fixed entry and/or transaction costs. Empirical studies strongly point to a significant structural...

This paper estimates the effect of labour income uncertainty on financial wealth and portfolio allocation using two data sources. Wealth and portfolio choice information is obtained from the master files of the new Canadian Survey of Financial Security 1999 (SFS). Labour income risk proxies are...

This paper investigates the responsiveness of household portfolios to tax incentives by exploiting a substantial tax reform that altered after-tax returns and cost of debt for a large number of households. An extraordinary panel data set that covers two years before and after the reform is used...

I use a unique data set of Canadian displaced workers to measure the effects of firm of employment on wages. This data set has the advantage of consisting of a sample of workers changing jobs for reasons (product demand shifts or technological changes) that are largely orthogonal to their...