This paper looks at changes in employment and relative wages of near higher earnings (NHE) workers between middle-class (MC) and higher earners (HE) in Canada over 2000-2015. An approach is also forwarded for evaluating these changes in terms of underlying demand and supply factors. It is found...

This paper provides an overview of the higher education sector in Canada, so it can serve as a comparison to that in Australia. It seeks to identify stresses and challenges to this sector in Canada. The study also seeks to offer possible lessons for the direction of higher education policy in...

In this paper, a new method is forwarded of estimating the effect of short-run macroeconomic fluctuations on concentration in the size distribution of personal income. In particular, the impacts of changes in unemployment and participation rates and in the level of wage and salary income upon...

This paper examines how the distribution of household wealth in Canada varies with age over the life cycle. The wealth distribution is characterized in terms of decile means and decile shares for each of six age groups, and comparisons between age-specific distributions are based on first- and...

Distribution-free techniques of statistical inference are developed for the cumulative coefficients of variation of an income distribution, thus allowing one to test for inequality dominance when Lorenz curves cross. The full covariance structure of the cumulative sample means and variances is...

Until fairly recently, the Pigovian position that activities generating unpriced external economies would be undersupplied was universally accepted. It rested on the simple assertion that marginal social benefits exceeded marginal private benefits of the activity, and that, by equating the...

The use of unemployment insurance and minimum wages as instruments for redistributing income are analyzed. The government is assumed to be able to implement an optimal income tax in an economy consisting of two ability-types of persons. The effect of introducing a minimum wage which induces...

Using the self-selection approach to tax analysis, this paper derives a modified Samuelson Rule for the provision of public goods when the government deploys an optimal non-linear income tax. This approach gives a straightforward interpretation of the central result in this area, generalizes it...

A model is constructed in which, given the inability of implicit contracts to be self-enforcing, a minimum wage policy combined with unemployment insurance can be welfare-improving. Unemployment insurance can be decentralized to the private sector if the government can commit to a minimum wage....

Despite the fact that all developed economies levy broadly-based indirect taxes alongside direct taxes, little theory is devoted to explaining the direct-indirect tax mix. Our purpose is to show that if different taxes have different evasion characteristics, some optimal tax mix emerges...