OPEC+ has set a goal of establishing a stable oil market and achieving a reasonable oil price that benefits all industry stakeholders and the global citizenry. But what price is reasonable? We examine the effect of the oil-price threshold on external balances with the aim of evaluating a...

We examine the impact of oil-price shocks, macroeconomic factors and pipeline bottlenecks on the evolution of wages in Alberta's oil and gas sector. The aim is to understand how wage-movements are affected by economic cycles in Alberta – an oil-exporting region – to provide policy...

In this paper, I examine the impact of oil price shocks, government expenditure, and Chinese investments in the energy sector on Alberta's economy. The aim is to understand how government expenditures transmit oil-price changes to the economy, thereby exacerbating economic cycles in Alberta, an...

Does OPEC still matter? How do OPEC and non-OPEC oil production, global oil demand, and the role of oil as a financial asset influence oil prices? What is the mechanism through which China affects oil prices? These questions reveal the need for a better understanding of oil market dynamics. Our...

The current 13th Five-Year Plan endorses the use of natural gas to achieve a cleaner energy mix. The objective of this research is to examine household natural gas demand and provide insights to natural gas exporters. Research on natural gas demand and cycles in China is valuable, because small...

Earmarked federal grants are ubiquitous and significant. Traditional fiscal federalism is unable to explain the widespread utilization of such grants. Recent arguments focusing on the potential benefits of centralized earmarking in reducing incentives for the creation of soft budgets at...

In a federation featuring decentralized leadership, regional governments compete by setting capital taxes in anticipation of the central government's fiscal-equalization and income-redistribution policies. As a benchmark, it is first demonstrated that the constrained socially optimal allocation...

In a federation with decentralized leadership, many regional governments provide multiple types of public goods and the center implements interregional income transfers. The symmetric perfect equilibrium under unlimited decentralized leadership is inefficient because regional public goods are...

Numerous non-profit organizations that contribute to collective goods also provide prestige to their members. Some of these institutions function as prestige clubs, with prestige levels and member contributions working as club goods and membership fees, respectively. We investigate the...

This paper offers a theoretical model for the analysis of illegal cartels. Given the nature of the cartel, retaliation is also illegal. To assess the stability of collusion as a criminal organization, we propose a one-shot game based on Bertrand competition with product differentiation. We...