Katherine Cuff is a Canadian economist who currently serves as Professor of Economics at McMaster University. She holds the Canada Research Chair in Public Economic Theory and has been recognized as a McMaster University Scholar. Cuff also serves as Managing Editor of the Canadian Journal of Economics and editor of the FinanzArchiv (Public Finance Analysis).
Biography
Cuff obtained a Bachelors of Arts in Economics with Honours at Queen's University in 1994, then went on to complete a Masters of Arts in Economics at York University in 1995. In 2000, she completed a Ph.D in Economics from Queen's University with her doctoral thesis, Three Essays on Optimal Redistributive Policies. Cuff then joined McMaster University's Department of Economics as an Assistant Professor until 2006, when she became an Associate Professor within the department. In 2016, she was conferred as a tenured Professor of Economics at McMaster University, where she remains at present. Cuff is faculty member of the McMaster Decision Science Laboratory (McDSL), an experimental economics research centre, where she focuses on the topic of funding and financing issues in Canadian healthcare.
Selected publications
"Optimal unemployment insurance and redistribution" (2018) Cuff and Robin Boadway undertake an analysis of unemployment insurance and redistributive taxes and transfers in a framework that acknowledges the employment choices of individuals with varying levels of skilled talent. A literature review finds that existing literature on the topic of optimal unemployment insurance is primarily concerned with the moral hazard issues associated with insurance policies, where individuals with insurance may feel a false sense of protection from it and then engage in risky behaviour that they would not otherwise condone. Using a model that utilizes an adaptation of an extensive-margin approach, while taking into account involuntary unemployment due to search frictions whereby individuals may decide themselves how intensely to search for work, the paper tests a number of propositions on optimal wage taxes and income transfers. The paper finds that an optimal policy would address large-scale effects of changes in wages using a "piecewise linear wage tax", or an income bracket-based approach to taxation that is able to address a variety of different levels of skilled work and productivity. Meanwhile, specific employment taxes and unemployment insurance remain available for redistribution without being overly concerned by potential repercussions of the insurance-moral hazard issue.