In this paper we document some features of the distribution of income, consumption and wealth in Canada using survey data from many different sources. We find that wage and income inequality have increased substantially over the last 30 years, but that much of this rise was offset by the tax and...

In this paper we analyse the effect of banks holding equity stakes in borrowing firms on the equilibrium level of interest rates and on the tendency of the borrowing firm to establish tighter links with the shareholding bank. Equity claims are defined as rights to receive dividend payments as...

Local amenities play an important role in determining where we choose to live and our overall quality of life. In many cases, however, amenities do not have prices and will therefore be underprovided by the market. In this paper, we use county level data for England and Wales to estimate...

Long-run recursive identification schemes are very popular in the structural VAR literature. This note suggests a two-step procedure based on QR decompositions as a solution algorithm for this type of identification problem. Our procedure will always deliver the exact solution and it is much...

This paper investigates the factors that shaped the demographic transition in a number of European countries (Sweden, England, and France) since the mid 18th century. The analytical framework is a version of the neoclassical growth model with dynastic preferences calibrated to match the Swedish...

This study evaluates the empirical significance of idiosyncratic pricing shocks in inflation dynamics. To this end, using store-level price data for a selected group of products and employing identification schemes dictated by (S,s) pricing theory, product-level Structural Vector Autoregressions...

In 1922 R. A. Fisher introduced the fixed X regression model, synthesising the regression theory of Pearson and Yule with the least squares theory of Gauss. The innovation was based on Fisher's realisation that the distribution associated with the regression coefficient was unaffected by the...

Standard macroeconomic forecasting indicators and techniques tend to perform poorly in predicting inflation in the short-run. The present paper shows that microeconomic price data placed in an empirical model rooted in (S,s) pricing theory convey extra information on inflation dynamics. The...

Concerns have been expressed that in a global market place with mobile capital, national governments will have incentives to set weak environmental policies (“environmental dumpingâ€) to protect the international competitiveness of their domestic firms, that these incentives are...