Month: June 2018

Smoking Bans Improve the Health of Children and Infants

ardynnordstrom

By Fanny McKellips, Queen’s University

It is a well-accepted fact that smoking and second-hand smoke have harmful effects on health.

For this reason, many measures are taken by governments to decrease smoking and exposure to second-hand smoke. Canadian provinces, for instance, have banned smoking in all public places and workplaces. In the United States, 25 states have banned smoking in public places. While this limits exposure of non-smoking adults to secondhand smoke, it may create a displacement of smoking from public places to homes. Could this mean that children and infants, who cannot make their own decision to be exposed to second-hand smoke, are negatively affected by smoking bans? This issue is not well understood as the literature surrounding smoking bans tends to focus on the health impact on adults. Read More »

Closing the Income Sprinkling Loophole: Fair and Likely Efficient

ardynnordstrom

By Frédéric Tremblay, Queen’s University

The Canadian government has recently announced that it intends to address what it considers to be three loopholes that allow tax planning using private corporations: income sprinkling, passive investments made by private corporations, and the conversion of a private corporations’ income into capital gains. This post will focus on the first form of tax planning, income sprinkling.

Income sprinkling refers to the use of the flexible structure of a Canadian-controlled private corporation (CCPC) to do income splitting with family members in lower tax brackets. This allows some Canadian small business owners to reduce their income tax burden in a way that is unavailable to other Canadians. Finance Canada estimates that closing the income sprinkling loophole would generate $250 million yearly in additional tax revenue[1]. Since the impact on federal finances is likely to be negligible, I focus my analysis on the issues of fairness and efficiency.

Read More »

Welcoming Brent Hickman

ardynnordstrom

By Nora Ottenhof, Queen’s Universityhickman

Queen’s University Economics Department is thrilled to welcome assistant professor, and J. William and Marion E. MacKinnon Junior Fellow, Brent Hickman into the faculty. Brent joined the QED faculty last summer from the University of Chicago. We would like to take this opportunity to highlight some of Professor Hickman’s work and celebrate some of his career accomplishments so far.  

Read More »