The growing labour force participation of women with small children in both the U.S. and Canada has led to calls for increased public financing for childcare. The optimality of public financing depends on a host of factors, such as the “crowd-out†of existing childcare arrangements,...

This paper examines the incentives for retirement imposed by Canada's public pension system. A series of simulations clearly illustrate the various components of the pension system that create incentives and disincentives among older Canadians for continued work. We find the largest work...

In this article, I extend the analysis of head-count measures of income and consumption poverty to all currently available microdata. Along with standard measures, I implement a relative poverty indicator using the well-being of working age families as a benchmark. I find that poverty among...

Like most other developed nations, Canada has a large income security system for retirement that provides significant and widely varying disincentives to work at older ages. Empirical investigation of their effects has been hindered by lack of appropriate data. We provide an empirical analysis...

We investigate the political and economic factors influencing the allocation of regional development grants for a panel of Canadian electoral districts in the 1988-2001 period. In a strong party system such as Canada’s, models of political competition predict little role for individual...

A vast literature has examined the impact of family income on the health and development outcomes of children. One channel through which increased income may operate is an improvement in a family’s ability to provide food, shelter, clothing, books, and other expenditure-related inputs to...

A vast literature has examined the impact of family income on the health and development outcomes of children. Income may improve child outcomes through two mechanisms. First, income may improve development outcomes if it improves a family’s ability to purchase direct inputs into child...