COVID-19 may accelerate the automation of jobs, as employers invest in technology to adapt the production process to safeguard against current and potential future pandemics. We identify occupations that have high automation potential and also exhibit a high degree of risk of viral infection. We...

In this paper, we estimate the effect on housing prices of the expansion of the Vancouver SkyTrain rapid transit network during the period 2001-11. We extend the canonical residential sorting equilibrium framework to include commuting time in the household utility function. We estimate household...

This paper develops a model of firm heterogeneity, technological adoption, and urbanization. In the model, welfare is measured by household real income, and urbanization is measured by population density. I use the model to derive statistics that measure the effect of a new technology on...

I use firm-product-level data for Canadian online retailers to study how product scope (the average number of product categories per firm) evolved from 1999 to 2012. During this period, product scope dropped monotonically from 59 to 5 product categories. Using a theoretical model of...

In this paper I use farm-level data from the Quebec dairy industry to estimate the relationship between productivity and participation in the Commercial Export Milk (CEM) program (2000-2003). Under the CEM program farmers could sell milk without production quota and faced a farm price that was...

The system of supply management in the Canadian dairy sector requires that farmers acquire quota to produce milk. In Canada's largest dairy producing province, Quebec, a ceiling on the price of quotas has been in effect since 2007. Previous research established that the use of quota price...