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Why did the United States experience a housing and mortgage market boom and bust in the 2000s, while analogous Canadian markets were relatively stable? Both US and Canadian markets are replete with government interventions. In this paper, I account for the US and Canada’s different experiences by arguing that government interventions are not created equal. Some government interventions prevent market participants from pursuing actions that ex ante are reckoned beneficial. Alternatively, other interventions lead to the pursuit of actions that turn out to be costly ex post. It is the latter type that we expect to manifest in crises. The US case is one where government interventions in the mortgage markets led to actions that appeared ex ante beneficial but were revealed to be costly ex post. Alternatively, Canada’s mortgage market was and remains essentially a regulated oligopoly. Regulatory capture makes for a sclerotic market that likely imposes costs on Canadian borrowers in the forms of limited financing options and higher interest rates. However, this sclerosis also lends itself to stability. This market structure made the Canadian mortgage market relatively insusceptible to a bubble.

Austrian Business Cycle theory (ABCT) has lately drawn increased attention as a result of its ability to explain the US financial crisis of 2007–2009. However, its explanatory power is questioned by the Canadian experience of the crisis, where a similarly loose monetary policy to the United States did not give rise to a similarly calamitous outcome. Accounting for this difference points to the necessity of elaborating the political element already contained in ABCT. This task of political science is most fruitfully done by focusing on the regime, that is, the distribution of the state’s offices and powers. These shape the incentives and ideals that move political action toward the financial sector. Though both Canada and the United States have democratic regimes, their origins and historical development have caused these to vary in significant ways. These variances largely clarify why the negative consequences of easy money predicted by ABCT were less pronounced in Canada than the United States.

A somewhat underappreciated aspect of the burgeoning rush to regional trade agreements (RTAs) is a discrepancy between the dispute settlement procedure (DSP) embodied in the original World Trade Organization (WTO) Dispute Settlement Understanding (DSU) and that found in the language of many RTAs. This chapter explores the issue in the context of a dynamic repeated game of trade agreements. As is well known, the institutional alternatives available in negotiating multilateral freer trade agreements – regional agreements, side agreements, trade dispute settlement punishments, and so on – can proscribe the limits and shape the nature of self-enforcing trade agreements. Here, we suggest the extent to which deviations from the WTO DSP embodied in RTAs – for example, “private interest access,” “third party procedures,” and “choice of forum” – can not only work against the interests of “weaker parties” but furthermore undermine multilateral agreements closer to free trade.

Scientists are known for their good ideas, but packaging those ideas into a commercial format requires skills, funding, and processes for which many scientists and their research institutions are all too often not equipped. The Victorian Government of Australia has developed a successful initiative designed to facilitate and commercialise scientific innovations. The purpose of this paper is to document the processes and the lessons drawn from the establishment of the Science, Technology, and Innovation (STI) Initiative.

This case study describes the Australian state of Victoria's STI Initiative over a four year period from its inception. The program was designed to enhance the ability to compete globally through commercialisation of Victoria's science capability and to facilitate greater industry innovation through collaboration with the science community.

The STI case demonstrates how the program has exceeded expectations with proven return on investment in less than four years. The case describes the STI's history, structure, strategies, processes, and methods of monitoring and evaluation. It also describes problems and difficulties that have occurred and how these were overcome. One of the major findings of the STI Initiative concerns the development of governance structures for each project. Rather than introducing rigidity and decision speed‐bumps, the introduction of well‐designed governance structures provides rapid and useful feedback and favourable control measures.

A large part of managing STI projects involves the establishment of funded grants and the development and management of commercial objectives and cooperation between the science and commercial sectors. It is argued that this successful format for commercialising science and facilitating innovation can be templated and therefore duplicated by governments almost anywhere in the world.

The lessons from this case study support the argument that there is a need for structure to formalise a successful relationship between industry, science, government, and investors. The paper provides a format for such a structure based on the experiences of the STI Initiative based in Victoria, Australia.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the extent to which a sample of US-based higher education institution’s (HEI’s) climate targets and associated climate action planning efforts align with the definitions of and practices associated with science-based targets (SBTs) that are typically used to organize corporate climate efforts. This analysis will be used to explore similarities and tease out differences between how US-based HEIs and corporations approach sustainable target setting and organize sustainable action.

The degree of intersection between a sample of HEI climate action plans from Ivy Plus (Ivy+) schools and the current SBT initiative (SBTi) general corporate protocol was assessed by using an objective-oriented evaluative approach.

While there were some areas of overlap between HEI’s climate action planning and SBTi’s general corporate protocol – for instance, the setting of both short- and long-term targets and large-scale investments in renewable energy – significant areas of difference in sampled HEIs included scant quantitative Scope 3 targets, the use offsets to meet short-term targets and a low absolute annual reduction of Scope 1 and 2 emissions.

This paper unites diverse areas of literature on SBTs, corporate sustainability target setting and sustainability in higher education. It provides an overview of the potential benefits and disadvantages of HEIs adopting SBTs and provides recommendations for the development of sector-specific SBTi guidelines.

The paper's aim is to analyze changes in the relative importance of Canada as a supplier for its home markets; and, the rising importance of China versus other Canadian trading partners.

The market overlap measure (MOM) statistic, developed by Sawchuk and Yerger is used to analyze the Canadian home market shares for Canada and every other nation with sales in the Canadian market for each of 61 different NAIC sectors (56 at the four‐digit NAIC level and five at the three‐digit NAIC level).

The USA remains the most important foreign supplier to Canadian markets with a weighted average 23.6 percent market share as of 2003 (Canadian‐based production having a 63.0 percent market share). US market share, however, has been declining by nearly a percentage point per year since 2000. Approximately, half of the lost US' market share has been captured by Canadian‐based firms and approximately a quarter has been captured by Chinese production. China's growth in Canadian market share places it second behind only the USA in terms of Canadian‐based firms' home market competitive exposure.

The work does not include an analysis of service sector trade flows due to inadequate data.

The MOM statistic is shown to be a useful diagnostic tool for analyzing the level of, trends in, and industries driving the competitive exposure a nation's firms have on sales in a specified market.

The MOM statistic is shown to yield better insights regarding the actual degree of competitive exposure than does the more commonly used similarity indices such as Finger‐Kreinen.

The paper's purpose is to show that the reported (and growing) labour productivity gap between the G7 and OECD countries and the USA might be a factor of the rapid adoption of shadow banking structures and techniques in the USA versus the adoption of those structures in OECD and G7 economies.

The paper explains the concept and practice of shadow banking and explores the ways in which the various conventions adopted distort reported productivity figures.

The growing adoption of shadow banking over the period 1974‐2007 has had the effect of increasing the metrics for labour productivity over the same period.

It is clear that those who wish to understand the apparent growing gap between labour productivity of the USA and other G7/OECD nations must look beyond the simple reported figures to identify the ways in which figures are calculated and reported.

The paper shows that reporting of figures to established conventions can be affected by a range of factors, not apparent from looking at those conventions themselves.

This study illuminates how organizational actors use images in their struggle to define a contested industry. By leveraging social semiotics and visual rhetoric, we examine how multimodal texts (combining words and images) are used to label and reframe an industry using technical, environmental, human-rights, and preservation-of-life criteria. Building on theories of legitimation, we find that for this industry, contesting attempts at legitimacy work are escalated along a moral hierarchy. We offer an approach for examining how actors draw from broader meaning systems, use visual rhetoric in multimodal texts, and employ dual processes of legitimation and de-legitimation.

Lack of progress advancing labour provisions in multilateral trade instruments has led some countries to develop their own labour chapters in bilateral and plurilateral trade agreements. This study aims to track the evolution of 25 years of labour chapters in Canadian trade agreements.

Modelled on Hoekman (1995), the authors present a novel index using the International Labour Organization’s (ILO) core labour standards to compare and evaluate ambition and enforcement in Canada’s labour chapters.

The quality of Canada’s labour chapters has steadily improved from 1994 to 2020, with scores rising from 46 to 91 out of 100. In addition, Canada has used its negotiating leverage to encourage partners with weak labour regimes to make improvements. Yet, the highest quality chapters were achieved with trade partners similar to Canada, and those chapters have not pushed either party to improve their own domestic labour regimes. The authors discuss the limits of the ILO standards for addressing contemporary debates about labour and trade.

The authors’ assessment provides the first empirical evidence to demonstrate that Canada’s labour chapters have evolved over time, and that the origins of this evolution predate the Liberal government’s progressive trade agenda by several decades. The authors also suggest that Canada’s “middle road” compromise on ambition versus enforceability may increase the relevance of the index for research on other middle powers and potentially countries in the global south.

We analyze corporate governance mechanisms in Canadian and US firms. We show that despite similarities in governance practices in both countries, there are differences in the efficacy of these mechanisms. In particular, the performance of Canadian firms is less sensitive to ownership structure than that of US firms. Differences are also found in the performance implications of incentive pay. Our study suggests that country-specific governance trends persist among Canadian firms cross-listed in the United States. These findings may explain why Canadian firms which are cross-listed in the United States continue to trade at a discount compared to their US counterparts.