During 1985-86, the acquisition editor for the humanities and social sciences division of Kluwer Academic Publishers in the Netherlands visited the University of Horida (where I was also visiting while on sabbatical leave from Wilfrid Laurier University as the McKethan-Matherly Senior Research Fellow) to discuss publishing plans of the faculty. He expressed a keen interest in publishing the proceedings of the conference of the Canadian Econometric Study Group (CESG) that was to be held the following year at WLU. This volume is the end product of his interest, endurance, and persistence. But for his persistence I would have given up on th~ project Most of the papers (though not all) included in this volume are based on presentations at CESG conferences. In some cases scholars were invited to contribute to this volume where their research complimented those presented at these conferences even though they were not conference participants. Since papers selected for presentation at the CESG conferences are generally the finished product of scholarly research and often under submission to refereed journals, it was not possible to publish the conference proceedings in their entirety. Accordingly it was decided, in consultation with the publisher, to invite a select list of authors to submit significant extensions of the papers they presented at the CESG conferences for inclusion in this volume. The editor wishes to express gratitude to all those authors who submitted their papers for evaluation by anonymous referees and for making revisions to conform to our editorial process.