PETER S. SPIRO -- PROFESSIONAL PUBLICATIONS
1. Book: Real Interest Rates and Investment and Borrowing Strategy (New York: Quorum Books, 1989, 238 pages). This book deals with the measurement and forecasting of long-run real rates of return on both fixed income and equity investments. It places particular emphasis on the way in which long-run rates of return are affected by changes in government policy, and on the risks inherent in forecasting. Reviews of this book have appeared in the Globe and Mail Report on Business (January 8, 1990), Financial Analysts Journal (July-August 1990), Business Economics (October 1990), Journal of Accountancy (July 1990), and Journal of Commercial Bank Lending (March 1990).
2. Articles and Comments in Refereed Journals
"Monetary Estimates of the Underground Economy: A Critical Evaluation." Canadian Journal of Economics, April 1996. Click here to Download in PDF.
"Estimating the Underground Economy: A Critical Evaluation of the Monetary Approach." Canadian Tax Journal, 1994, no. 4.
"The Underground Economy: Toward a More Balanced View of Alternative Methodologies." Canadian Business Economics, Summer 1994. Click here to Download in PDF, 118Kb.
"The Differential between Canadian and U.S. Long-Term Bond Yields." Canadian Business Economics, Winter 1994. Click here to Download in PDF, 322Kb.
"Evidence of a Post-GST Increase in the Underground Economy." Canadian Tax Journal, 1993 No. 2. Click here to Download in PDF. Warning: 1.2MB file.
"Economists' Forecasts of the Canada-U.S. Exchange Rate: Efficient Markets versus Purchasing Power Parity." Business Economics, October 1991.
"The Effect of Government Debt on Short-Term Real Interest Rates." International Monetary Fund Staff Papers 37, December 1990.
"Foreign Borrowing and the Real Exchange Rate." Journal of Macroeconomics 12, Fall 1990.
"Comments on the Symposium on the Budget Deficit." Journal of Economic Perspectives 4, Fall 1990.
"Should the Discount Rate Change if an Electric Utility is Privatized?" Engineering Economist 36, Fall 1990.
"The Impact of Interest Rate Changes on Stock Price Volatility." Journal of Portfolio Management 16, Winter 1990.
"Improving a Group Forecast by Removing the Conservative Bias from Its Components." International Journal of Forecasting 5, 1989 No. 1.
"The Effects of Government Debt and Deficits on Interest Rates." Business Economics 23, October 1988.
"The Elusive Effects of Fiscal Deficits on Interest Rates: Comment on Tanzi." International Monetary Fund Staff Papers 34, June 1987.
"New Findings on the Effects of Inflation on Interest Rates." Business Economics 22, April 1987.
"Public Utility Finance and the Cost of Capital: Comments on Jenkins." Canadian Journal of Economics 20, February 1987.
"Exchange Rate Risk and the Cost of Foreign Capital." Canadian Public Policy 10, March 1984. Click here to Download in PDF. Warning: large file.
3. Articles in Other Journals
"Some Productivity Surprises." (Co-authored with Pierre Fortin and Andrew Sharpe.) A new perspective on the debate about the Canada-U.S. productivity differential. La Presse, October 2002. Click here to Download in PDF.
"Real Wages and Labour Markets in the 1990s." Policy Options, May 1991.
"Free Trade and the Canadian Dollar." Canadian Business Review, Winter 1988.
"New Federal Sales Tax Would Be an Inflation Booster." Financial Post, July 20, 1987.
"The Corporate Income Tax and Electric Utilities." Public Utilities Fortnightly, June 26, 1986.
"Taxing Questions on Energy." Policy Options, May 1985.
"Through a Dark Glass: Only a scenario approach is likely to be valid in predicting the results of radical policy changes." Policy Options, May 1984.
"Inflation: Just a Matter of Interest." Benefits Canada, March 1984.
"The Real Rate of Interest for Corporate Planning." Public Utilities Fortnightly, Dec. 9, 1982.
"Alternative Methods of Inflation Adjustment in Utility Rate Making." Public Utilities Fortnightly, March 2, 1978.
4. Book Reviews
David Colander and Dewey Daane, The Art of Monetary Policy (M.E. Sharpe), reviewed in Financial Analysts Journal, Nov.-Dec. 1994.
Harry Greenfield, Invisible, Outlawed and Untaxed: America's Underground Economy (Praeger, 1993), reviewed in Business Economics, July 1994.
Alfred Malabre, Lost Prophets: An Insider's History of the Modern Economists (Harvard Business School Press, 1994), reviewed in Financial Analysts Journal, Jan.-Feb. 1994.
Ronald J. Wonnacott, The Economics of Overlapping Free Trade Areas and the Mexican Challenge (C.D. Howe Institute, 1991), reviewed in Canadian Public Policy, December 1992.
"Comments on Schwert's Review of Market Volatility," in Journal of Portfolio Management, Fall 1992.
David P. Calleo, The Bankrupting of America: How the Federal Budget is Impoverishing the Nation (Morrow, 1992), reviewed in Financial Analysts Journal, July-August 1992.
Paul Krugman, The Age of Diminished Expectations (MIT Press, 1991), reviewed in Financial Analysts Journal, November-December 1991.
Franklin Edwards, ed., Regulatory Reform of Stock and Futures Markets (Kluwer Academic, 1989), reviewed in Financial Analysts Journal, May 1991.
Robert Shiller, Market Volatility (MIT Press, 1989), reviewed in Financial Analysts Journal, September 1990.
Stephen Cohen and John Zysman, Manufacturing Matters: The Myth of the Post-Industrial Economy (Basic Books, 1987), reviewed in Business Economics, April 1989.
5. Conference Papers
"Canadian Interest Rates and the Canadian Dollar: Why do they (usually) move in the same direction?" Conference on Money, Financial Institutions and Macroeconomics, York University, April 12, 1995.
"A Critical Evaluation of Monetary Estimates of the Underground Economy," Canadian Economics Association, Calgary, June 1994.
"Taxes, Deficits and the Underground Economy," Fraser Institute Conference on the Impact of the Underground Economy, Vancouver, April 22, 1994. Published in THE UNDERGROUND ECONOMY: GLOBAL EVIDENCE OF ITS SIZE AND IMPACT, edited by Owen Lippert and Michael Walker, The Fraser Institute, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, 1997. To download this article in pdf, click here.
"Tax Policy and the Underground Economy," in Size, Causes and Consequences of the Underground Economy: An International Perspective edited by Christopher Bajada and Friedrich Schneider (Ashgate Publishing, 2005). To download this article in pdf, please click here.
"Taxation and the Growth of the Underground Economy," C.D. Howe Institute HIPAC Conference, Ottawa, December 1993. (The same presentation was subsequently given to the WEFA Group, the Ontario Legislature Standing Committee on Finance and Economic Affairs, and to the Toronto Association of Business Economists.)
"Does the yield difference between nominal and indexed bonds predict inflation?" This is a research paper on Canadian Real Return (inflation indexed) bonds, June 2004. Click here to Download in PDF, 120K. Click here for a summary.
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