Over the years the number and importance of earmarked grants has at times risen and at times fallen in different countries. The conventional theory of fiscal federalism, which sees earmarking largely as a means to deal with positive spillovers in local expenditures, explains neither the level of...

We estimate the causal effects of a pandemic-era wage subsidy program in Canada on job losses and business closures. Our estimates use administrative microdata and a regression discontinuity strategy to estimate the effects of marginal changes in the wage subsidy rate. The estimated net wage...

With recent accessions to the federal-provincial Harmonized Sales Tax, provinces with value added taxes (VATs) now comprise over two-thirds of the national economy. While Canadian VATs are economically superior to the taxes they replaced, they are not as well designed as in other countries. An...

The personal income tax systems in Canada, the United States, and elsewhere permit deductions or tax credits for out-of-pocket health care expenditures and private medical insurance premiums. Little is known about the effects of such tax measures on individual behaviour, in contrast to the...

Investors frequently hold equity in tax-exempt savings vehicles such as pension plans, despite the prediction of the standard model that they hold only bonds. We provide a new explanation for this empirical puzzle based on differences between pensions and taxable assets in the tax treatment of...

We derive necessary and sufficient conditions on preferences for uniform taxation to be Pareto efficient in a many-consumer economy. We argue that uniformity is desirable only under conditions far more restrictive than suggested in previous literature, most of which is based on analysis of a...

Intergovernmental transfer programs in many federal systems, including Canada, attempt to equalize differences in subnational jurisdictions' tax capacities on the basis of the so-called representative tax system (RTS). It is shown that RTS equalization grants effectively compensate local...

No Abstract.

We study a screening game in a competitive insurance market, in which insurance customers differ with respect to both accident probability and degree of risk aversion. It is shown that indifference curves of customers in different risk classes cross exactly twice: thus the single crossing...