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Department of Economics |
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Department of Economics |
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| Discussion Papers |
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| The Economic and Social Impact of Covid-19 on British Columbia | As a complex social and economic system, British Columbia is composed of many components which interact with each other. By focusing resources and efforts almost exclusively on one component of that system – healthcare – second order economic and social effects were overlooked. In other words, decisions have consequences, some intended, others not. This report is meant for policy makers and the general public. It is to show how the British Columbia economy and society were affected by two years of lockdowns and various other pandemic control measures. |
| The Tyranny of Chronological Age | (Economics of Education) This is a study of the relative age effect in child cohorts found in sports and education. This paper presents a structural model of the progression of children grouped in age cohorts through an educational or sports system where children are selected by performance and allocated to "tiers" (enriched classes or first division sport teams) |
| Dogs of War | (Law and Economics) This paper develops a two stage game of injurer and victim. The investment in legal services are endogenous and influence the probability of a court awarding damages for negligence. The paper demonstrates that potential injures will have an incentive to strategically engage in ex-anti investment in legal services to deter action ex-post by potential victims. |
| Environmental Regulation, Asymmetric Information, and Moral Hazard |
(Environmental Economics) This paper addresses the issue of enforcement of environmental policies when measurement of firm behavior is costly. In the paper a model of environmental regulation is developed which focuses on the firm’s incentive to cheat on its required levels of abatement. Environmental regulation is modeled as principle-agent problem where the private objectives of the agent (the firm) may differ from the objectives of the principle (society, via the regulator) |
| Dual organizational structures of franchise contracts | (Industrial Organization) This paper extends the work of Mathewson and Winter (1985) in the field of franchising. Given the hypothesis that a franchise contract ensures quality compliance at a lower cost relative to alternative organizational structures, the existence of dual organizational structures within the same franchise chain is inadequately explained. This paper extends the basic model of Mathewson and Winter into a spatial framework, demonstrating that non convexities in monitoring costs will produce dual organizational structures within the same chain. |