We study the effects of the CEGEP innovation of the late 1960s in the province of Quebec on total years of schooling based on a difference-in-difference methodology applied to the microdata from the 20% sample of the 2001 Canadian Census long form. Eight demographic groups are investigated,...

We use worker-firm matched data from Homebase to construct new real-time estimates of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on employment and hours worked of small businesses. We find four key results: (1) employment of small businesses in four of the hardest hit service sectors contracted by an...

This paper studies the design of the optimal linear taxation of bequests when individuals differ in wage as well as in their risks of both mortality and old-age dependance. We assume that the government cannot distinguish between bequests motives, that is whether bequests resulted from...

This background paper was prepared for the Bank of Canada conference on the 2021 renewal of the inflation-control agreement between the Bank and the Government of Canada held online in August 2020. The first part of the paper focuses on the fact that the room for conventional monetary stimulus...

We harness big data to detect prime locations-large clusters of knowledge-based tradable services-in 125 global cities and track changes in the within-city geography of prime service jobs over a century. Historically smaller cities that did not develop early public transit networks are less...

The International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Laxenburg, Austria, was founded during the period of détente in 1972 to bring together scientists from East and West to research shared problems, and thus to build a "bridge" between the two opposed systems. The underlying...

This paper pursues two objectives. First, we determine the sufficient condition for local, statistical identification of SVAR processes through the third and fourth unconditional moments of the reduced-form innovations. Our findings provide novel insights when the entire system is not...

In SVARs, identification of structural shocks can be subject to nonfundamentalness, as the econometrician may have an information set smaller than the economic agents' one. How serious is that problem from a quantitative point of view? In this paper we propose a simple diagnostic for the...

This paper proposes t-like unit root tests which are consistent against any stationary alternatives, nonlinear or noncausal ones included. It departs from existing tests in that it uses an unbounded grid set including all possible values taken by the series. In our setup, thanks to the very...

This paper exploits changes in the course of the Yellow River in China to isolate exogenous variation in the natural distribution of economic centers across space and over 2,000 years. Using original data on population and taxation from dynastic histories and local gazetteers, I assess the...