THE CANADA AT A CROSSROADS SERIES
Canada is at a crossroads. The issues confronting Canada in 2025 go beyond mere setbacks and can more accurately be called crises. Unless they are resolved quickly, we face a deep and potentially permanent loss of our national standard of living and quality of life. We hereby introduce the “Canada at the Crossroads” series of reports from the Macdonald-Laurier Institute. Each one is a relatively short essay explaining the problem at hand and outlining potential solutions. This series will not propose minor tweaks to existing strategies, nor will it look only for modest course corrections. Canada is beset by incompetent governance, runaway and rampant ideology, social malaise, and a national identity crisis. Its future is at stake – and the time for small, hesitant steps has passed. It is in this spirit that we invite readers to join us as we confront the problems facing our country and set out serious, disruptive ideas to make 2025 the year Canada began to step back from the brink.
VOLUME 1: THE HOUSING CRUNCH
By Ross McKitrick
February 11, 2025
Introduction
Canada faces a severe housing affordability crisis. Housing costs are far outpacing income growth and are creating a significant barrier to homeownership for many Canadians. The crisis can be boiled down to a mismatch between housing supply and demand, exacerbated by factors such as declining real disposable income, a discrepancy between the types of dwellings built and the needs of the Canadian population, increasingly restrictive building codes, excessive development charges, and surging immigration levels. This report outlines a comprehensive strategy to address the issues by tackling both the demand- and supply-side factors affecting affordability.
On the demand side, Canada’s rate of new housing unit construction approximately matched population growth from 2000 to 2021, but thereafter, the immigrant population surged, and housing completions could not keep pace. To align population growth with housing capacity, Canada needs to reduce its excessive immigration, particularly among temporary workers and visa students. Further, the federal government needs to better plan and coordinate with the provinces.
On the supply side, it is essential that federal building codes be reformed to remove costly “green ideology” provisions, and that provinces give municipalities greater flexibility to match housing types to demand. The federal government should also take steps to expose where municipal development charges have become excessive and work with provinces and cities to bring them down. A proposed financing mechanism, the Canadian Residential Infrastructure Development Annuity (CRIDA), could alleviate upfront development costs and reduce housing prices.
This report underlines the importance of timely action. Canada’s governments must undertake decisive measures to reverse decades of policy missteps. Canada can restore housing affordability, promote economic growth, and enhance the quality of life for its citizens, but only if it takes multiple actions – not in a piecemeal fashion, but in tandem.
To do this, we must first identify the nature of Canada’s housing problem, and outline specific measures that a new government can implement to fix it. The first section of this report explains the scale and cost of the problem, especially in comparison to the United States. It also provides details about the pace of home construction compared to drivers of population change, and the changing mix of home construction in Canada. It then discusses possible solutions, examining demand- and supply-side measures separately.
The scale of the problem
Canadian and US housing costs began to diverge after the 2008 financial crisis because US prices fell dramatically while Canada’s remained largely stable (Carlson 2023). The following chart shows the Real Housing Price Index (RHPI) published by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas (Undated) for Canada and the US since 1975 developed using the Mack and Martínes-García (2011) method. Note that it refers to the cost of single family homes.
Another way of looking at the divergence is to compare how housing prices diverged from incomes in the two countries. The following chart shows the ratio of RHPI to Real Personal Disposable Income (RPDI) scaled so that 1975:Q1 = 100.0. While US house prices rose after 2013 so did US incomes, so the ratio of RHPI to RPDI remained roughly constant. But in Canada since 2000 incomes did not rise in the same way, so single family home prices have doubled relative to real income, with a particularly strong spike after 2020.
According to RBC, a household earning the median Canadian income would now need to allocate two-thirds of its income to housing costs in order to afford a home. The combination of weak income growth and rapid housing cost increases has created the present affordability crisis (Hogue 2024).
The post-2008 ramp in the costs of single-family homes is partly due to the trend towards constructing apartments rather than single family homes. The overall supply of new housing units in Canada has roughly kept pace with the size of the adult population over the past 30 years, but the supply mix has changed. Figure 3 shows the number of new dwellings completed per thousand persons over the age of 18 since 1971. There was a decline in housing completions through the 1970s and a continued downward trend until 2000, after which construction rates levelled off and have held steady through the present.
But there has been a change in the mix of housing types, due to a switch away from building detached family homes in favour of apartment buildings. Figure 4 shows the total housing completions by type of dwelling: single detached homes (orange), semi-detached homes including townhouses (green), and apartments (blue).
Notice the cross-over after 2000. The rate of single detached home building was about eight per thousand adults in the 1970s but is only about two now. The rate of construction of semi-detached units also dropped after the mid-1970s but held steady at about one per thousand after 1990. Apartment unit completions also fell from about six per thousand in the 1970s to under four today. But that is an increase from about one per thousand in the late 1990s. The rate of apartment unit completions now exceeds both of the other building types combined. Thus, while the number of housing units per ’000 adults is roughly the same as it was 30 years ago, the mix has shifted sharply towards apartments.
The COVID pandemic in 2020 caused a sudden demand for larger detached homes as many people switched to remote online work arrangements. But the new building mix remained heavily tilted towards small apartments. This helps explain the 2020 spike in the RHPI, which refers to single family home prices. While the changing mix may reflect changing consumer demands pre-COVID, an important factor to consider is the role of overly restrictive provincial and municipal planning rules. With the rise of work-from-home arrangements, detached homes, and semi-detached townhomes remain in high demand.
Excess immigration has also been a driving force behind rising house prices. Figure 5 shows the rate of immigration compared to the adult (i.e., working age) population in Canada since 1991. As the fertility rate in Canada has been declining sharply since the 1960s (Provencher and Galbraith 2024), Canada has been relying on immigration to maintain the growth of its working-age population. Since the early 1990s immigration levels were consistently around 1.0 per cent of the adult population. But after 2021, immigration levels surged and domestic housing costs spiked. This put obvious pressure on the demand side of the market and will need to be addressed as part of any overall solution to housing costs.
In summary, significant factors affecting housing affordability since the early 2000s include the failure of real incomes to increase on pace with housing costs, a mismatch between the types of dwellings built and the needs of the Canadian population, and, from 2021 onward, a surge in immigration numbers.
Solution strategies: increase supply, lower costs, and reduce excess demand
Ultimately the issue comes down to a mismatch between supply and demand – although the cost problem has been exacerbated by rising municipal and provincial developer charges, the increasing regulatory burden in the building code system, and provincial restrictions on municipal planning steps. According to an analysis by the Canadian Centre for Economic Analysis (2024), of the approximately $1 million cost of a new home in Ontario, 35.6 per cent is made up of taxes and fees on both developers and home buyers, which is double the tax rate on other comparable goods. As a result, governments earn about four times as much on a new home as developers do.
Demand-side strategies
Reducing excess immigration
Canada’s rate of new housing unit construction approximately matched population growth from 2000 to 2021, but thereafter the immigrant population exploded and the housing stock could not keep up. It would have been difficult under any circumstance for builders to keep up with the post-2021 population surge but since that also coincided with continued supply chain issues post-COVID and high interest rates due to the inflationary episode, the market mismatch made soaring prices inevitable.
The main problem on the immigration front has been the enormous increase in the numbers of students on visas, Temporary Foreign Workers, and other irregular immigrant classes. While they have mostly gone to a few large urban centres including the Greater Toronto Area, Greater Vancouver Regional District (now known as Metro Vancouver), Calgary, and Montreal, the displacement of other people out of those areas has propagated the housing cost problem across the country.
From 1991 to 2018 Canada’s population (aged 20 and up) grew on average by 1.5 per cent per year (Statistics Canada 2024b). To the extent that housing completions reflect our traditional population growth rate that is the pace of increase we were building for. But from 2019 to 2024 the adult population grew by 2.1 per cent per year, including by a combined 6.6 per cent in 2023 and 2024 alone. Had population growth remained on trend after 2018 there would have been 996,000 fewer adults in Canada as of 2024. That number establishes a benchmark for the reduction in population that needs to be achieved in the very short run in order to address the acute portion of the housing supply mismatch.
This will, among other things, entail enforcing exit requirements on the current temporary worker population as their visas expire, deporting those here illegally and sharply reducing the numbers allowed in under the same programs in future. By one recent estimate there are 2.7 million temporary residents currently living in Canada, and between 300,000 and 600,000 illegal immigrants evading deportation (Glavin 2024). Simply dealing with the illegal immigrant population would go a long way to achieving the basic reduction in numbers required to resolve the acute portion of the housing cost mismatch. Thereafter immigration numbers must be held to lower levels until housing prices have returned to their pre-2015 norm.
Immigration planning
Based on discussions with provincial government officials I have learned that, traditionally, when the federal government sets immigration targets they are based on consultations with the provinces, but the consultation only involves the labour ministries. To the extent that this is the case, the consultation process needs to be reformed.
- The federal government needs to obtain from provinces their annual numbers of housing completions, not merely intentions to build.
- Likewise (although peripheral to the present topic) the provinces must report on actual expansions to their medical system capacity, and this must serve as an overall constraint on immigration numbers.
- Labour market needs, including the desire of colleges and universities to bring in foreign fee-paying students, should be canvassed but not prioritized until such time as the housing price situation is under control. Once that has happened, labour market needs should be considered, but there is no need to accede to the desire of schools and universities to fill seats, if accommodating their excess capacity creates even larger costs for everyone else.
Supply-side strategies
Allow municipalities the flexibility to match housing types to demand
Figures 3 and 4 showed that while the number of new housing units kept up with population growth for a time, since 2000 there has been a strong trend towards building fewer single-family homes and more apartments. When COVID arrived in 2020, demand swung heavily towards single-family residences that could accommodate more home offices and more space for kids who were kept out of school for long periods. But such units were in relatively short supply so prices of detached homes soared, even in rural areas. The COVID effect is gradually reversing although it remains an open question whether people will ever go back to in-person office work with their accompanying commutes at the rates seen prior to 2020. It is likely that there has been a long-term relative shift away from apartments and towards single detached homes. Therefore, in response to market needs, municipalities need the flexibility to plan not just for high rise apartments but a range of housing types, including new greenfield neighbourhoods of detached and semi-detached houses.
To this end the recent revisions to Ontario’s Provincial Planning Statement provide a model for other provinces to emulate (if they have not done so already) (Ontario, Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing 2024). This is the guidance document issued at the provincial level to which municipalities must conform their own plans. Under the McGuinty-Wynn governments (which ruled Ontario from 2003 to 2018) it was a sprawling two-volume, highly prescriptive door-stopper. Under the current Ford government, it has been stripped down to a single 56-page pamphlet with many “shoulds” and relatively few “shalls.” Municipalities shall make enough land available to accommodate expected population growth over the next 20 years. And the plans should encompass a range of housing needs. The document says:
Planning authorities shall support general intensification and redevelopment to support the achievement of complete communities, including by planning for a range and mix of housing options and prioritizing planning and investment in the necessary infrastructure and public service facilities (Ontario, Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing 2024, 8).
The language weakly mandates densification but also recommends a range of housing types, not just high-rise apartments. It goes on to assign to municipalities the task of setting appropriate intensification targets. A list of specifically identified “large and fast-growing municipalities” are “encouraged to plan for a target of 50 residents and jobs per gross hectare” in designated growth areas.
With regards to population forecasts, there is an interesting discrepancy between the municipalities’ own forecasts and those generated by the Ontario Ministry of Finance. The former are much smaller, and a table comparing them (not public but which I have seen) yields a total discrepancy of about a million units. In other words, municipalities have generated growth plans over the coming years for about a million fewer units than the Ministry of Finance forecasts they will need. If cities are systematically underestimating future housing needs the provinces need to find out why this is the case and take steps to remedy it.
Roll back the federal Model Building Code [MBC] to the June 2003 edition, remove all post-1997 National Energy Code provisions, and restructure the MBC process to get the green central planners out of the way
Building codes are set by provinces but the federal government plays a coordinating role through the national Model Building Code (MBC) process (Canada Undated a), which the Canadian Board for Harmonized Construction Codes (CBHCC) manages. Building codes used to be focused on ensuring structural integrity, durability, and user safety. These criteria have long been met in Canadian construction, and regular refinements (CBHCC 2023) based on feedback from builders and consumers aid in ongoing quality improvements.
Unfortunately, since 1997 the national and provincial building code processes have been taken over by energy efficiency zealots who have imposed a massive and costly regulatory burden on builders through the so-called National Energy Code (Canada 2017), driven by unscientific and vague environmental goals. These have greatly increased the cost of new home construction (for specific details see CHBA 2018). One estimate places the cost burden of recent net zero requirements at $55,000 per new home, on average (McKitrick 2023). The federal government should immediately remove these provisions from the national MBC and urge the provinces to adjust their codes accordingly.
Green ideology now runs all through Canada’s building code process. For example, the 2017 National Energy Code revisions (Canada 2017) boast that they are aimed at “achieving ‘Net Zero Energy Ready (NZER)’ buildings by 2030.” The “Intent Statements” (National Research Council of Canada 2018) list countless requirements that have nothing to do with safety or comfort but are motivated by climate activism. For instance, Section 4.2.1.5(1) explains that the requirements for interior lighting are designed to prevent:
Inaccurate determination of the interior lighting power allowance, which could lead to power used for lighting exceeding acceptable limits, which could lead to excessive use of power, which could lead to unnecessary consumption of energy for lighting, which could lead to excessive use of energy, which could lead to an unacceptable effect on the environment.
This ludicrous chain of what-ifs sounds like something straight out of Soviet-era central planning. It is astonishing that building code bureaucrats imagine they have the authority to determine what are “acceptable limits” for people when it comes to how much lighting they can have, or to determine what is “excessive” or “unnecessary” use of power – as if bureaucrats thousands of kilometres away know better than the residents who live in a home and pay the bills. It is also highly inaccurate to assume that energy use automatically harms the environment in a country like Canada, where the vast majority of power production comes from non-emitting sources like hydro and nuclear; even Canada’s fossil-fuel-based power sources have become exceptionally clean over the past 50 years.
This “central planning” language runs all through the National Energy Code. For instance, regulations on the placement of thermostats are justified as follows (Sec. 5.2.8.6(1)):
To limit the probability that the heating or cooling supply to a zone will not be controlled, which could lead to overheating or overcooling the zone, which could lead to excessive use of energy, which could lead to an unacceptable effect on the environment.
It evidently does not occur to the people writing such things that the people who live in a house and pay the heating bills might be in the best position to decide where thermostats should go. Needless to say, HVAC equipment as a whole is heavily regulated for so-called energy efficiency, again on vague environmental grounds motivated by the belief that bureaucrats can determine whether a homeowner is using “excessive” amounts of energy (Sec. 5.2.12.1.(1)):
To limit the probability that heating, ventilating, and air-conditioning equipment and components will not meet minimum acceptable levels of performance, which could lead to inefficient equipment and/or systems, which could lead to unnecessary consumption of energy for heating and cooling, which could lead to excessive use of energy, which could lead to an unacceptable effect on the environment.
Green ideology not only affects existing building codes but also threatens to dominate future codes not only for home building but even for renovations of existing homes. Proposed changes to the 2026 Code editions are motivated as follows:
Climate change is the biggest challenge facing humanity today, consequently, it is vital that the Codes address this gap to support Canada in reaching its emissions reduction target of 40% below 2005 levels by 2030 and net-zero emissions by 2050. Furthermore, achieving long-term climate goals requires early action on operational GHG emissions. Failure to address this pivotal issue could impede Canada’s progress towards its emissions-reduction targets, jeopardizing the ability to effectively combat climate change and protect the future well-being of the country. The commitment to a sustainable future demands that these emissions be addressed comprehensively and urgently (Canadian Board for Harmonized Construction Codes 2024, 144, code reference NBC20 Div. B 9.36).
There are no grounds for arguing that the regulations are necessary to promote energy efficiency. The government’s own 2011 Energy Efficiency Trends Report (see Figures 3.6 and 3.13) show that Canadians were becoming more energy efficient in their homes long before the National Energy Code rules began to be introduced (Natural Resources Canada 2011). People invest in energy efficiency and improved building methods when it is economically advantageous to do so, in other words, when the benefits exceed the costs. But as with anything else, there are points where diminishing returns set in. Regulators ought to respect the ability of the market to identify those points. By mandating investments in more and more energy efficiency regardless of the costs, the government has turned what used to be improvements in living standards into waste and a drag on living standards.
Economic analyses of energy efficiency regulations have repeatedly shown that they fail to deliver the promised savings either for homeowners or for the economy as a whole (McKitrick 2015, McKitrick and Adams 2016, Fowlie, Greenstone, and Wolfram 2018; Bruns, Moneta, and Stern 2020). The cost-benefit calculations that bureaucrats typically use to justify ever-expanding energy efficiency regulations are flawed by the paternalistic assumption that governments know better than consumers how they should spend their money, which leads them to misclassify costs to homeowners as benefits (Gayer and Viscusi 2013). It would have been justifiable to get rid of these rules long ago – and in fact the entire process by which they have come to infest the building code process – but it is especially essential now that we face a housing cost crisis.
A suitable benchmark for deregulation is to go back to the Fifth Revision of the 1995 National Building Code, which the federal government released in June 2003 (Canada Undated b), and which predated all the National Energy Code intrusions. That version of the code outlines basic structural and safety standards; competent builders in Canada are perfectly capable of offering home buyers a menu of variations and options to reflect improved materials and methods developed in the years since if they yield better value for the buyer.
The problems created when every part of government subordinates its planning to green ideology is that, rather than coming to decisions that reflect a proper balancing of conflicting priorities, everything gets directed towards the one goal – to the detriment of everything else. Not only has the singular net zero focus come at the cost of excessive housing prices, but it has also contributed to reductions in indoor air quality and human health. Buildings that are increasingly airtight and densely insulated create greater risks of exposure to persistent moulds and fungi as well as increased radon gas exposure (for a review, see Ortiz, Itard, and Bluyssen 2020). Unfortunately, health considerations like these are now ignored in the maniacal push for net zero.
The Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC Undated) should be tasked with quantifying the costs to Canadian homeowners attributable to the takeover of the building codes process by green ideology. But decisions need not await the results of that research: a new government needs to reassert control over the CBHCC and implement a series of code rollbacks to maintain building safety and structural integrity while leaving all energy efficiency measures to the judgment and preferences of builders and homeowners.
Create and publish a comprehensive database of municipal development charges and benchmarks
Municipal development charges (DCs) are a large component of the cost of new builds. As indicated above, they can make up to 35 per cent of the cost of a new home. But it is surprisingly difficult to say exactly how large the cost is because the numbers are not collected and published in one place. According to provincial government contacts, even provincial officials have difficulty getting the numbers. Private-sector data aggregators such as the Altus Group provide city-specific construction cost estimates (Altus Group 2024), but not for DCs. DCs can often be obtained from municipal websites (see, for instance, Guelph 2024) and from provincial databases (Ontario publishes municipal Financial Information Returns; see Ontario 2023). But Canada needs a national database that shows, for easy comparison:
- DCs by city for each type of housing development, in total and broken down into components.
- Historical DC financial accounts by municipality, including uncommitted reserves.
By making the data publicly available in a readily accessible format, citizens can begin to see how their city compares to others and in places where the DCs are excessive (as indicated by the growth of large uncommitted reserve funds) voters will have the information they need to demand cost reductions.
To this end, each region should also publish a set of DC benchmarks that indicate the reasonable amounts municipalities should aim to charge. Ontario recently passed Bill 23 (Ontario 2022) that mandated some reductions in DCs, and the underlying Ontario Development Charges Act (Ontario 2024) itself exempts some building projects, but for the most part municipalities have considerable freedom to impose the charges as they see fit. In this respect each municipality is a local monopoly and we should not be surprised to see fees exceed marginal costs, especially with so little public disclosure. Publishing benchmarks would provide some constraint on excessive DCs.
Furthermore, provinces and municipalities should be encouraged to look at ways of allowing private competition in the infrastructure process whereby developers could undertake the infrastructure work itself, subject to municipal inspection, rather than relying on city crews, if the developers think they can do it more efficiently.
Create new a financing vehicle to alleviate the upfront DC burden
DCs are payable when a building permit is issued. This creates a very large upfront financing burden on developers, which is then passed on in lump-sum form to new home buyers. Attempts to allow these costs to be spread out over time would require provincial legislative changes and would impose management and borrowing costs on cities. The federal government could alleviate this burden (without shifting it to taxpayers) by creating a financing vehicle called a Canadian Residential Infrastructure Development Annuity (CRIDA). The Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation or a new special-purpose Crown corporation could manage this.
A CRIDA would involve purchasing from an eligible municipality a 20-year annuity at the federal borrowing rate with the present value set to equal the DC on a new housing project. Supposing the DC on a new house is, say, $50,000, and the current borrowing rate is 3.1 per cent: the federal agency would pay the municipal government $50,000 to cover the DC and in turn receive a future stream of payments equalling, in this example, $3,392 annually for 20 years. The homeowner would then be assessed the $3,392 annually on his or her property taxes, which would disappear from the property tax bill after 20 years.
The revenue stream would be guaranteed against the property value with a federal backstop guarantee in limited exigent circumstances. Neither the province nor the municipality would have to revise any laws or regulations since the DC would be paid up front according to the current rules. The interest rate should be set to appeal to the risk-free instruments market; part of the interest rate could be used to fund the corporation’s operations and the remainder would be the return to investors. Aside from an initial injection of funds to get the operation started, the fund would rely on private investors seeking a risk-free and redeemable interest-bearing asset.
Ultimately a CRIDA would not transfer any costs onto taxpayers, but it would reduce the cost of financing new projects and lower the purchase price of a new home. It would substitute federal borrowing costs for homeowner borrowing costs for the DC portion of a new build.
The federal government could use the CRIDA option as a carrot to encourage municipalities to become more receptive to new developments. Currently each province is host to a mix of cities with varying attitudes towards new development. Some are keen to “play ball” while others are hostile and are erecting new barriers to entry. Eligibility for CRIDAs could be a major boost for municipalities and the rules might involve things like:
- The municipality has opened up enough new land to accommodate growth plans consistent with provincially forecasted housing needs.
- The municipality places no restriction on use of natural gas or other federally permitted heating systems in new builds.
- The municipality agrees to a fixed timeline for project approval.
- The municipality agrees to cap DCs at the regional benchmark with no compromise on the quality of services.
Where necessary, requirements could also be placed on the provinces to ensure they approve projects in a timely manner and avoid unnecessary project costs.
Implementation challenges
While the government needs to reduce its overall staffing levels, it will still need to add staff in some areas so it can remove the backlog of illegal immigrants and process the removal of people on newly expired visas.
The deportation of people who want to remain in Canada will generate obvious hardship and a lot of potentially negative press coverage. There will be considerable pressure on MPs to seek exceptions and favours for sympathetic cases in their ridings. Policy-makers must keep the suffering experienced by Canadians who have been priced out of the housing market front and centre in their minds.
Regarding the efforts to expand the supply of housing, the leader of the federal Conservative Party has proposed a plan to use the threat of reduced funding to coerce municipalities to facilitate faster home construction by, for example, reducing development charges and permitting high density building along transit routes. The threat must be credible, which will require actually stripping funding from non-compliant cities. This will of course generate backlash.
Some colleges and universities will suffer losses of revenue once the number of visa students is cut. The federal government should encourage Ontario to lift its tuition freeze so this revenue can be replaced.
Conclusion
Canada stands at a critical juncture in addressing its housing affordability crisis. The next federal government will need to quickly address this urgent policy conundrum. The availability of affordable housing is consequential, as it affects a great many other aspects of our quality of life. Without swift and decisive action, rising housing costs will continue to deter Canadians from starting families and raising children, and continue to undermine the financial stability of Canadian households and hinder economic development. This report has identified key factors driving the crisis and outlined practical, evidence-based solutions to increase housing supply, reduce costs, and realign demand with capacity.
Implementing these strategies will require coordination between federal and provincial governments, and a willingness to confront and dismantle bureaucratic bloat. While challenging, the potential benefits are considerable. Resolving the housing crisis will not only provide relief to millions of Canadians but also secure the nation’s long-term economic and social stability.
About the author
Ross McKitrick holds a PhD in economics from the University of British Columbia (1996) and is a professor of economics at the University of Guelph in Guelph, Ontario. He is the author of Economic Analysis of Environmental Policy (University of Toronto Press 2010). He has been actively studying climate change, climate policy, and environmental economics since the mid-1990s. He built and published one of the first national-scale Computable General Equilibrium models for analyzing the effect of carbon taxes on the Canadian economy in the 1990s. His academic publications have appeared in many top journals. He has also written policy analyses for the Fraser Institute (where he is a senior fellow), the CD Howe Institute, the University of Calgary School of Public Policy, and other Canadian and international think-tanks. In addition to his economics research his background in applied statistics has led him to collaborative work across a wide range of topics in the physical sciences including paleoclimate reconstruction, malaria transmission, surface temperature measurement, and climate model evaluation.
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