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Mike Abbott began his third term as Chair of Undergraduate Studies in July 1995, and is continuing in that capacity for 1996-97. He co-organized, with Charlie Beach and Rick Chaykowski, a labour economics conference in honour of Stephan Kaliski entitled "Transition and Structural Change in the North American Labour Market"; the conference, sponsored by the John Deutsch Institute and the Industrial Relations Centre took place at Queen's in May, 1995. Mike, Charlie and Rick are currently editing a volume of papers from that conference. A paper co-authored with Charlie Beach and Steve Kaliski entitled "Wage Changes and Job Changes of Canadian Men: Empirical Evidence" was published in Aspects of Canadian Labour Markets: Essays in Honour of John Vanderkamp (1995) by the U. of T. Press.

In addition to his continuing work on immigrant earnings in Canada, Mike is currently engaged in a project with Charlie Beach and two collaborators from Statistics Canada, which is investigating empirically the employment and wage effects of payroll taxes in Canada. During the 1995-96 academic year, he and Charlie presented early findings from the payroll tax project to seminars at the Conference Board of Canada and Statistics Canada, and the 1996 Canadian Economics Association meetings.

In 1994-95 Charles Beach while on sabbatical, spent his time at Queen's working principally on two census research monographs on changes in income distribution in Canada for Statistics Canada. In July, 1995, he became Managing Editor of Canadian Public Policy/Analyse de Politiques with the journal office being set up in the School of Policy Studies at Queen's. He was actively involved in the planning of Canadian Employment Research Forum (CERF) conferences in Ottawa and elsewhere, and in the research evaluation of the Self-Sufficiency Project, a labour market test experiment helping single parents on welfare being run by HRDC in New Brunswick and Vancouver. He also chaired the so-called Data Liberation Initiative (DLI) in Ottawa making Stats Canada data much more accessible to university students and researchers.

Charles has published two recent books, Labour Market Polarization and Social Policy Reform, edited with Keith Banting and Are we Becoming Two Societies?: Income Polarization and The Myth of the Declining Middle Class in Canada, written with George Slotsve. The latter study was published by the C.D. Howe Institute. He also published papers in Empirical Economics and the Canadian Economic Observer and has forthcoming papers in International Economic Review and the Canadian Tax Journal.

James Bergin in the last year has published papers in Economic Theory, Social Choice and Welfare, and Econometrica. His current research is in the fields of Anonymous Games, Implementation, Non-cooperative Foundations and Endogenous Game Forms. Jim is currently on leave at the University of Barcelona.

Dan Bernhardt is busy trying to finish all of the projects that have been on his cluttered desk. Research that he hopes to complete include: theoretical work dating back to 1989 with Jim Bergin on entry and exit of firms over the business cycle; work with Sangita Dubey and Eric Hughson on term limits and pork barrel politics; theoretical and numerical work with Burton Hollifield dating back to 1988 on learning and asset pricing; empirical work dating back almost to the 19th century with Eric Hughson on takeovers...

Dan's publications in 1995-1996 are "Splitting Orders", with E. Hughson, Review of Financial Studies; "Discrete Pricing and the Design of Dealership Markets", with E. Hughson, Journal of Economic Theory, "Strategic Promotion and Compensation" Review of Economic Studies; "Investment and Insider Trading" with E. Hughson and B Hollifield, Review of Financial Studies; "Anonymous Sequential Games: Existence and Characterization", with J. Bergin, Economic Theory; "Direct Relations versus Signalling in Finance", with G. LeBlanc, Canadian Journal of Economics.

In brief giddy moments Dan believes that he will soon be able to begin research on competition among financiers, entry and exit of financiers; mutual fund manager incentives; money and banking and various topics in theoretical and empirical market micro structure.

Dan will be honeymooning at the Olympics in Atlanta watching various athletes with whom he trained and coached. Dan is contemplating how being married... with children will affect his life. Congratulations to both Margaret and Dan on Robert Drew, born 7 November 1996.

Robin Boadway had articles published in Oxford Economic Papers, European Economic Review, and Policy Options, in addition to writing some forthcoming papers and chapters for several books. His current research interests include fiscal federalism, design of grants under asymmetric information, and endogenous growth and unemployment insurance. Robin has also been busy presenting papers across Canada and abroad, in Sweden, Britain, Portugal, and Tunisia. He keeps out of mischief as the President of the Canadian Economics Association, on the executive for the International Seminar on Public Economics, and on the editorial board for International Taxation and Public Finance.

Lorne Carmichael's research is continuing, albeit at a slower pace as he continues as Head of the Department. He is currently most interested in evolutionary models of preferences, with applications to the study of bargaining. The theory is applied and tested each time he meets the Dean. Last year this work was presented to conferences at Wilfrid Laurier University and in Japan. While in Japan Lorne also participated in a panel discussion on the productivity of white collar workers for the benefit of a large group of business executives. He has also been considering the productivity of academics, and presented his paper "Restructuring Ontario Universities" at a conference at Laurentian University in 1996.

Tom Courchene continues his role as editor of the Bell Canada Papers on Economic and Public Policy and as Director of the John Deutsch Institute. On the publication side, his recent books include Social Canada in the Millennium, Redistributing Money and Power: A Guide to the CHST and Celebrating Flexibility (1995 Howe Benefactors Lecture). Courchene has also published numerous articles on social policy, globalization and federal-provincial relations. His recent series of research trips to Australia have resulted in several analyses of comparative Australia/Canada federalism. He is currently completing a book on political economy of Ontario.

Russell Davidson having managed to get sabbatical leave at the same time from Queen's and Aix-Marseille II, spent the whole of the 95-96 year based in Marseille, where he was able to do a good deal of joint research with James MacKinnon. Russell was invited to be a discussant for the invited session on the bootstrap at the Econometric Society World Congress in Tokyo in 1995 and this stimulated him to embark on a program of research on boot strap tests. So far, the resulting paper has been presented in Paris (CREST) and the English Econometricians' Study Group in Bristol. It was also rehashed, in a newer version, for the CESG in Waterloo in September, 1996.

Other topics of current interest include statistical inference on measures of income inequality, poverty, and such like, applications of wavelets to econometrics, and applications of different geometry. Russell Published a paper on inequality measures, joint with Jean-Yves Duclos of Laval. The wavelets work gave rise to a presentation in Brussels in December, 1995 and to a paper presented at the conference on Computing in Economics and Finance in Geneva in June, 1996.

John Duggan is currently finishing up papers in several theoretical areas: implementation theory (co-authored with QED's Joanne Roberts), game theory (presented at the Canadian Economic Theory meetings in Vancouver), strategy-proofness, and formal political theory. John recently completed articles on non-cooperative foundations (with the eminent Jim Bergin) and extensive form implementation. The latter paper was presented at New Directions in the Theory of Markets and Games, a conference in honour of Robert Aumann, and at the winter meetings of the Econometric Society. The 1995-96 academic year saw two papers published - one in Journal of Economic Theory and one in Economic Theory - with articles in Journal of Economic Theory and Social Choice and Welfare forthcoming. John received a SSHRCC research grant for 1996-99 and is visiting the Wallis Institute of Political Economy at the University of Rochester for the 1996-97 academic year.

Chris Ferrall has published two papers on the distribution of earnings among engineers, one in the Industrial and Labour Relations Review and the other forthcoming in the Journal of Human Resources. Chris is currently working on a paper that compares the transition from school to work in the U.S. and Canada. The paper will appear in a special issue of the Journal of Business and Economics Statistics. The issue will be devoted to empirical applications of dynamic programming. Chris is also researching with PhD candidates on a number of subjects ranging from the Canadian unemployment insurance system, the Canadian welfare system, the economics of AIDS, and a study of incentives and compensation. Chris is also working on a study of physician behaviour with Allan Gregory.

Chris has travelled extensively this year presenting papers at the Stanford Institute for Theoretical Economics, the International Health Economics meetings in Vancouver, and the Econometric Society meetings in San Francisco. He attended the summer workshop at the Institute for Research into Poverty at the University of Wisconsin, presented seminars at Wilfred Laurier, Guelph, UQAM, Laval, McMaster, Lakehead, Western Ontario and at Human Resources and Development in Ottawa. Chris' current teaching involves writing a set of interactive statistics tutorials for undergraduate econometrics and publishing a paper describing the tutorials in the electronic Journal of Statistics Education.

Frank Flatters is continuing to direct the department's CIDA-funded collaboration and assistance programs with the Malaysian Institute of Economic Research (MIER) and the Thailand Development Research Institute (TDRI). He has recently completed and published studies on conflicts over water use and water management policies in Thailand (with Ted Horbulyk and colleagues at TDRI), administrative corruption and taxation in developing countries (with Bentley MacLeod), and the relationship between import substitution and export promotion policies in rapidly developing East Asian economies (with Rick Harris). He is currently working on reviews of development policies and issues in Indonesia (with Frank Barry, Glenn Jenkins and Joanna Nader) and Thailand (with Ammar Siamwalla). His general interests remain in the area of applied microeconomics, with particular emphasis on policy implementation issues, public sector and resource economics, and international trade.

Patrick Francois' principal research interests relate to both development economics and gender discrimination in competitive labour markets. The work undertaken in development economics has been principally concerned with the role of Coordination Problems in explaining underdevelopment. In a dynamic context these have been explored in a joint paper with Jean-Marie Baland published in the Journal of Development Economics. Jean-Marie and Patrick have extended the analysis to examine the role of assett trade in solving coordination problems, as well as the importance of demand complementarities in giving rise to these problems.

The aim of Patrick's Gender Discrimination project is to explain equilibrium outcomes in which productively identical women and men are rewarded differently in competitive labour markets. Much of the work here is joint with Siwan Anderson and draws on male/female interaction within the household to provide explanations. In addition to these projects, Patrick is engaged in joint work with Shouyong Shi aimed at providing an endogenous explanation for aggregate cycles by explicitly modelling the effects of innovation on market structure.

Devon Garvie has been very heavily involved as Chair of the Arts Curriculum Review Committee for the School of Environmental Studies. This committee has been very committed to developing an Arts stream in the School and they are enthusiastic with the progress that has been made. Devon is continuing her work with Bart Lipman regarding the optimal design of environmental regulations when firms can legally challenge the regulations in an environment with legal uncertainty. A paper with Vicki Barham studies environmental technology tranfers between rich and poor countries. A second paper with Dominique Demougin examines the incentives provided by alternative tort laws. A new project that Devon is involved in this year deals with assessing the efficiency, distributional and environmental consequences of voluntary codes in pollution-generating industries. From this work, she hopes to generate some new insights on mandatory compliance versus voluntary compliance schemes.

Alan Green, in addition to his SSHRC grant with Mary MacKinnon of McGill, is part of a federally funded research project on immigration entitled "Research on Immigration and Integration in the Metropolis". This is essentially a Center of Excellence project centered at Simon Fraser University that will take approximately five years to complete.

Allan W. Gregory continues as Associate Head for the Department. The following papers were published over the year: "Testing for Cointegration in Models with Regime and Trend Shifts" (with Bruce Hansen), Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, "Business-Cycle Theory and Econometrics" (with Gregor Smith), Economic Journal and "Measuring Business Cycles with Business-Cycles Models" (with Gregor Smith), Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control. Other research papers include: "Measuring World Business Cycles" (with Allen Head), "Practice Setting and Labour Supply of Physicians in Canada" (with Chris Ferrall and William Tholl), and "Common and Country-Specific Fluctuations in Productivity, Investment and the Current Account" (with Allen Head).

Also Allan and Mick Devereux organized a special issue of the Canadian Journal of Economics (November, 1995) in honour of Doug Purvis. Allan is an Associate Editor of the Journal of Business and Economic Statistics and a member of the Editorial board of the Journal of Applied Econometrics.

John Hartwick scratched an itch to understand banking by leading a seminar for fourth year undergrads during the winter of 1995-96. Each student worked on an empirical research paper and John ended up with his "take" on the subject in "The financial capital constraint and the valuation of commercial banking activity". He also revised a paper presented at the 1995 Canadian Economics Association, entitled "The capitalization of wage increments in urban land value". He lectured for the second time at the summer program of the Harvard Institute for International Development on the economics of sustainability. A survey paper on this topic will appear in a Handbook edited by Tietenberg and Folmer. A related paper will appear in a special issue of Land Economics.

In October he presented a seminar at University College, London, and the notes for it are in a CIRANO discussion paper, "Constant Consumption and the Economic Depreciation of Natural Capital: the Non-autonomous Case", co-authored with N.V. Long. Long, Larry Karp, and John also worked up a paper "True Economic Depreciation and Valuation Invariance with Optimizing Firms" on the neutral corporate income tax. "Constant Consumption in Open Economies with Exhaustible Resources" appeared in the Review of International Economics. "Constant Consumption as Interest on National Wealth" will appear in the Scandinavian Journal of Economics.

Allen Head has been working in the areas of open economy macroeconomics and economic fluctuations. This year he published a paper in the Canadian Journal of Economics and two papers jointly with Mick Devereux and Bev Lapham, one in the Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control and one in the Journal of Money, Credit, and Banking. Allen is also working with Allan Gregory on a series of papers dealing with the measurement of common and country specific components in business cycles for the G7 countries. The two of them also collaborated on a study of leading and coincident indicators of the Malaysian economy for the Malaysian Institute of Economic Research.

He is studying international interest rate differentials in a project with Gregor Smith; the determination of prices and exchange rates in search theoretic monetary models with Shouyong Shi; and the cyclical behaviour of price-cost markups in collusive market structures with Bev Lapham. Allen was one of the organizers of the Macroeconomics workshop held November, 1996 at Queen's.

Debra Holt is proceeding with research in the areas of game theory and experiments with particular emphasis on bargaining and public goods provision. Her most recent papers are "Fairness and Learning in Bargaining", "Bargaining Games: Estimation with Simulated Date for Design of New Experiments", and "Equilibrium in Games with Primitive Belief Structures".

Beverly Lapham continues to work on the dynamics of imperfect competition in the fields of international economics, growth, and aggregate fluctuations. Some of her recent work has appeared in the Journal of Economics, Dynamics, and Control and the Journal of Money, Credit, and Banking. Her current projects include joint work with Roger Ware in which they examine intertemporal interactions among lobbying interest groups to highlight endogenous links between current and future trade policies and better explain the observed persistence of such policies. Also in the area of international economics, she is currently working on a project with Marianne Vigneault (Bishops University) which studies the behaviour of international relative prices in the presence of time-varying deviations from the Laws of One Price.

She continues her work with Allen Head in exploring the theoretical and empirical cyclical properties of mark-ups of price over marginal cost in environments with collusive market structures. Bev is chair of the Appointments Committee and recently joined the Editorial Advisory Board for the Canadian Journal of Economics.

Frank Lewis continues his work with Ann Carlos on the fur trade and on the role of information in the composition of foreign capital flows during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Their more recent papers appeared in a conference volume on Anglo-American finance and in Explorations in Economic History. Frank also published a paper in Explorations he began writing while on sabbatical in Israel in 95-96, in which he valued the property lost by Palestinian refugees during the 1948 war. In fact, he recently returned to Israel where he presented seminars on this politically-sensitive research, escaping with minimal damage. Frank also wrote a paper with Mac Urquhart on the economy of Upper Canada, which they presented in Pasadena at a conference on The Economy of Early British America. It is soon to appear in a volume of the same title.

James MacKinnon has been working on bootstrap testing, bias correction by simulation, graphical methods for Monte Carlo experiments, and the computation of distribution functions for unit root and cointegration tests. James spent the 1995-96 academic year on sabbatical at GREQAM in Marseille, France, where he experienced better weather than in Kingston but also a great many public sector strikes. In 1995, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and he was awarded the Queen's Prize for Excellence in Research. James is an Associate Editor of the Journal of Econometrics, Software Review Editor of the Journal of Applied Econometrics and coordinator of its electronic data archive, which is located at Queen's.

During 1995 and 1996, James presented papers at Princeton University, INSEECREST (Paris), the University of Toulouse, Carlos III University and Complutense University in Madrid, Cambridge University, the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium, the Tinbergen Institute in Amsterdam, the University of Geneva, the European University Institute in Florence, and University College of the University of London, as well as at several conferences.

Tom McCurdy spent 1995-96 on sabbatical at the University of Toronto. Tom continues his work on semi-Markov econometric models. Tom was invited to present various aspects of this project at Laval, Montreal, Toronto, UQAM, Windsor and York. Another research interest is the development of econometric models of the volatility of asset returns for use in pricing derivative securities. One project in this area focuses on the long-memory component. His paper with Paul Michaud, "Capturing Long Memory in the Volatility of Equity Returns: a Fractionally Integrated Asymmetric Power ARCH Model", has been presented at Queen's, University of Toronto and York as well as at CIRANO and the French Finance Association Meetings. Another related project deals with sources of intraday volatility of asset returns.

Tom's paper with Dirk Eddelbuettel, "The Impact of News on Foreign Exchange Rates: Evidence from Very High Frequency Data", was presented at the 1996 CEA meetings. Tom has two other recent papers: "Hedging Foreign Currency Portfolios" (with L. Gagnon and G. Lypny) which was presented at the Northern Finance Meetings and is under revision for the Journal of Empirical Finance; and "An International Economy with Country-Specific Money and Productivity Growth Processes", jointly with N. Ricketts, which appeared in the special issue of the Canadian Journal of Economics in honour of Doug Purvis. Beginning July 1, 1996,

Tom moved on to the Finance Group at the Faculty of Management, University of Toronto where he is also associated with the Institute for Policy Analysis. He hopes to come back to Queen's in the summer months as often as possible.

Marvin McInnis' main pre-occupation these days is writing two chapters dealing with nineteenth and twentieth century Canada for a forthcoming Cambridge Population History of America. These will provide an opportunity to synthesize some of the research he has been doing over the past couple of decades. Last spring Marvin was on the road to several schools in the US presenting a paper entitled "Walking Distinctively or Just Going with the Flow: Canadian Immigration to the US in the Late Nineteenth Century." More recently he addressed the economic history workshop at Queen's on the topic of reinterpreting Canadian economic growth in the Wheat Boom era, and is about to take this message on to universities in Alberta. This coming winter Marvin will be teaching at the university's "east campus" at Herstmonceux.

Frank Milne must be relieved, he is no longer the Coordinator of Graduate Studies. In his new found free time Frank published a book Finance Theory and Asset Pricing. He has also published two papers with David Kelsey, one in The Journal of Economic Theory and the other in the Journal of Mathematical Economics. Frank and David also have two forthcoming papers one in Economic and Environmental Risk and Uncertainty: New Models and Methods and the other in Econometrica. He has published papers with Dilip Madan in Mathematical Finance and E. Neave in Management Science. E Neave and Frank continue to work together on a number of unpublished papers. Frank attended a derivatives conference at Queens, an NBER decentralization conference at the University of Alabama and a mathematical finance conference at the University of Montreal. Frank's research interests remain asset pricing, general equilibrium and finance theory.

Martin Prachowny spent 1995-96 completing his book, soon to be published, entitled Working in the Macroeconomy.

Shouyong Shi was awarded a three year (1996-1999) research grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. For the last two years Shouyong has been teaching one of the graduate courses in the field of Money, Banking and Stabilization policy. He has also published "Money and Prices: A Model of Search and Bargaining," in the Journal of Economic Theory and has forthcoming papers in Review of Economic Studies, Econometrica, and the Canadian Journal of Economics.

Gregor Smith's research is on consensus forecasting (with Allan Gregory), international interest-rate differentials (with Allen Head), and solving dynamic programmes by GMM (with Marc Andre Letendre). His work on macroeconometrics and international macroeconomics was published in the Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control and the Economic Journal among others. He also wrote the Canadian edition of the intermediate macroeconomics textbook titled Macroeconomics by Andrew Abel and Ben Bernanke. In 1995 he was promoted to full professor. He also served on the university senate task force on student aid and was a co-editor of the Journal of International Economics.

Gordon Sparks is teaching economics at the International Study Centre, Herstmonceux Castle, U.K. Since the opening of the ISC in September, 1994, the Economics Department has been an active contributor to the academic program. Gordon has been in residence at the Castle teaching Economics of the European Union. He is currently on sabbatical leave for the 96-97 academic year and spending some of his time at Herstmonceux.

Klaus Stegemann in 1995-96 had his fourth and final sabbatical. He used it to shift the focus of his research towards the new World Trade Organization (WTO) and multilateral agreements for "new issues". Prominent among these is the Agreement on Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS). During the Fall Term, Klaus enjoyed the hospitality of the Law and Economics Programme at the University of Toronto's Faculty of Law, participating weekly in the famous Trebilcock/Howse seminar on international trade regulation and numerous workshops organized by this lively institution. In March and April, he was guest of the Max-Planck-Institute for Research into Economic Systems, which was established in 1993 at Jena in former East Germany. He enjoyed working there with high caliber graduate students and being exposed to large doses of the "new institutional economics".

Klaus presented his paper on Agenda Setting for New Issues in the Uruguay Round at the meetings of the Canadian Law and Economics Society in Toronto and the European Public Choice Society at Tiberias, Israel, as well as at the Jena Institute. He also presented a paper on "Trade Law Reform in the Context of Rigorous Competition Policy" at the Asia-Pacific Workshop in Singapore. The purpose of the workshop was to prepare part of the potential agenda for the first WTO Ministerial meeting to be held at Singapore in December l996.

Dan Usher has published a book this year titled The Uneasy Case for Equalization Payments. He also has two forthcoming papers: Education as a Deterrent to Crime in the Canadian Journal of Economics and Rawls and Objectives: a critique of the two principles of justice, in Constitutional Political Economy. Dan attended a conference sponsored by Canadian Public Policy in March 1995 on the Interests of English Canada. Dan's research interests are public finance, fiscal federalism and political economy.

Marianne Vigneault visited Queen's from Bishop's University for the 1995/96 academic year. While here, she worked with Robin Boadway and Maurice Marchand (CORE) on tax policy within a federation and with Beverly Lapham on relative price movements. She has begun a new research project with Robin Boadway and Maurice Marchand examining entrepreneurship and unemployment, and is dusting off a project begun last fall with Chiara Bronchi (Keele University) examining corporate income tax competition. She is also, in association with Robin Boadway, involved in a research project for the Department of Finance's Technical Committee on Business Taxation. Marianne published in International Tax and Public Finance and Economic Letters, the latter co-authored with Robert Sproule from Bishop's University.

Ruqu Wang's interests are in multiple-object auctions, bargaining, consumer switching cost models, and the theory of coalition formation. One paper comparing bargaining and posted-price selling was published in European Economic Review. Two papers on labour market theory, one of Ruqu's earlier interests, are forthcoming in Journal of Labour Economics and Labour Economics: An International Journal. Various working papers were presented at University of British Columbia, the Summer Institute of Game Theory at SUNY Stony Brook, the Canadian Economic Theory Conference at Simon Fraser University, and the Industrial Organization Conference at Carleton University.

Roger Ware completed a six month sabbatical at Berkeley in the first half of 1995, then returned to take up the position of Graduate Coordinator. He has been pursuing his research interests in Competition Policy, completing a new paper on network industries, and another paper surveying Abuse of Dominance cases. His ongoing research projects include the economics of electronic banking.

by Kari Heinrichs and Tracy McCutcheon

Last modified: 4 March 1997
URL: http://qed.econ.queensu.ca/pub/newsletter/1996-97/faculty_activities.html