We consider legal obligations against a background of social norms, e.g., societal norms, professional codes of conduct or business standards. Violations of the law trigger reputational sanctions insofar as they signal non-adherence to underlying norms, raising the issue of the design of...

In communities highly dependent on rainfed agriculture for their livelihoods, the common occurrence of climatic shocks such as droughts can lower the opportunity cost of having children, and raise fertility. Using longitudinal household data from Madagascar, we estimate the causal effect of...

We investigate the returns to college attendance in Canada in terms of health and mortality reduction. To do so, we first use a dynamic health microsimulation model to document how inter-ventions which incentivize college attendance among high school graduates may impact their health trajectory,...

In this paper we analyse the link between homeownership and various aggregate and individual labour market outcomes. Our aim is to investigate the likely consequences of public policies that promote homeownership. To this end, we develop a circular firm-worker matching model with Nash-bargained...

This paper investigates international index return predictability using option-implied information. We document the significant predictive power of the variance risk premium (VRP), Foster-Hart risk (FH), and higher-order moments for horizons ranging from 1 to 250 days. Our results from...

We examine the different hypotheses which have been put forward to explain the low demand for long-term care insurance using the results from a survey of 2000 Canadians that was conducted in the autumn of 2016. Defining the natural market of long-term care insurance buyers as the one catering to...

Civil conflicts spill over into neighboring countries. This paper proposes a theory of the contagion of civil wars. Weak territorial control facilitates the emergence of a regional market for war inputs in the “porous frontier.” The contagion effect is nonlinear and creates multiple...

This paper assesses the contribution of Canadian and International (US) confidence data, drawn from consumer and business sentiment surveys, for forecasting Canadian GDP growth. The targeting approaches of Bai and Ng (2008) and Bai and Ng (2009) are employed to extract promising predictors from...

This paper compares the environments in Bernanke et al. (1999) and Gertler and Karadi (2011), two popular frameworks used to incorporate financial frictions in macroeconomic modelling. We show that the key practical difference between the two frameworks lies in their implications for the link...

This paper develops a monitoring and forecasting model for the aggregate monthly number of commercial bank failures in the U.S. We extract key sectoral predictors from the large set of macroeconomic variables proposed by McCracken and Ng (2016) and incorporate them in a hurdle negative binomial...