Objectives Recent studies suggest an ambiguous relationship between obesity and cigarette taxes. We employ Canadian data to evaluate the effects of cigarette taxes on smoking and obesity.Methods We use a simple reduced form approach and exploit the significant cross-province differences that...

Decreasing inflation uncertainty, as the major source of welfare costs, requires finding the driving factors of this variable. Counting inflation as one of the driving factors of inflation uncertainty has created some concern due to the ambiguity over the causality between inflation and...

Decreasing inflation uncertainty, as the major source of welfare costs, requires finding the driving factors of this variable. Counting inflation as one of the driving factors of inflation uncertainty has created some concern due to the ambiguity over the causality between inflation and...

We build a unique industry-level panel data set to estimate border effects with respect to U.S.-Canada trade for each year from 1992 to 2005. Estimates from data aggregated at the province/state level yield border effects in the early 1990s that increase slightly and then decline after the...

Since gasoline has a relatively inelastic demand, raising government revenue via gasoline taxes could appear appropriate as it entails a relatively small deadweight loss. However, gasoline retail is generally a highly concentrated market, hence the assumption of perfect competition when...

This two-volume original reference work provides a comprehensive overview of development economics and comprises contributions by some of the leading scholars working in the field. Authors are drawn from around the world and write on a wide range of topics.

A central parameter for evaluating tax policies is the price elasticity of demand for cigarettes. But in many countries this parameter is difficult to estimate reliably due to widespread smuggling, which significantly biases estimates using legal sales data. An excellent example is Canada, where...

We study the cause of large fluctuations in prices in the London Stock Exchange. This is done at the microscopic level of individual events, where an event is the placement or cancellation of an order to buy or sell. We show that price fluctuations caused by individual market orders are...