This study examines the factors that influence charitable behaviour in the Canadian context. Using the 2013 General Social Surveys on Social Identity and Giving, Volunteering, & Participating, I examine how variations in one’s human, social, and cultural capital influence the decision to volunteer and give. I find that all three forms of capital are important predictors of charitable behaviour.
This paper uses a parametric Heterogeneous Autoregressive [HAR] model augmented with central bank public speech sentiment to forecast S&P 500 implied volatility (CBOE VIX). Text sentiment computed by Natural Language Processing [NLP] algorithms may be measured with error due to estimation inaccuracy which leads to statistical bias and inconsistency in OLS estimation. As such, I propose two alternative methods to incorporate sentiment measures and contrast their performance through out-of-sample performance and the Diebold-Mariano [DM] test.
Distance to school is a major barrier to education in the developing world. This barrier can be much more prominent for girls, who often report more substantial safety concerns. This paper uses primary data from World Visions IGATE-T program and propensity score matching to determine the effect that distributing bicycles had on girls’ feelings of empowerment, test scores, and school attendance. Overall bicycles led to an increase in literacy and numeracy test scores by .23 and .28 standard deviations respectively. There was no clear effect on attendance or empowerment.
Common pool resources present a challenging problem for management institutions. The tragedy of the commons, the externality associated with common pool resources, results in inefficient competitive equilibria. The over-exploitation of scarce resources and over-investment by resource extractors are a result of this externality. Fisheries are a commonly cited case study for this phenomenon.
This paper examines the effects that martial status, having children in the home, and having young children has on a person’s likelihood of being over or under educated for their job. We classify a person overeducated if for example the mean level of education for their occupation is a bachelor’s degree, but they have a PhD then they are overeducated. The opposite is what undereducation is classified as, say a person with a bachelor’s degree is working at a job where the mean level of education is a PhD, then that person would be classified as undereducated.
Non-communicable diseases (NCDs) place substantial health and economic burdens on Canadians and the public health system. While not all NCDs can be prevented by improving nutritional health, sugar-sweetened beverages (SSBs) have been linked to higher risks of type 2 diabetes and obesity-related cancers and chronic diseases. The early indicators among nearly 50 local and national SSB taxes around the world have influenced Canadian provinces such as British Columbia and Newfoundland and Labrador to implement their own province-wide SSB tax.
With the help of a dynamic general equilibrium model calibrated for the Canadian economy, we look at the potential impacts of implementing a wealth tax on the wealthiest Canadians. The emphasis is put on the government’s ability to collect revenues from this form of taxation. We also study whether such a tax would be welfare improving for society as a whole. In an extension to the model, we introduce endogenous wealth tax evasion and analyze how this affects our results. We find that a wealth tax may lead to welfare gains provided that the proportional tax rate is less than 1%.
Department of Economics
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