Standard models suggest that adverse labor demand shocks will lead to bigger employment losses if institutional factors like minimum wages and trade unions prevent downward wage adjustments. Some economists have argued that this insight explains the contrast between the United States, where real...

For more than a decade, the United States and Canada have been engaged in a rancorous dispute over trade in softwood lumber. Through three successive rounds of administrative litigation before the U.S. Department of Commerce, the U.S. sawmill industry has sought to have countervailing duties...

In recent years a growing number of countries have constructed data series on job creation and job destruction using establishment- level data sets. This paper provides a description and detailed comparison of these new data series for the United States and Canada. First, the Canadian and United...

This paper asks whether the vaunted comparative stability of the Canadian banking system has been purchased at the cost of creating an oligopoly. We assembled a data set that compares bank failures, lending rates, interest paid on deposits and related variables over the period 1920 to 1980. Our...

Over 12 million persons migrated to Canada or the United States between 1959 and 1981. Beginning in the mid?1960s, the immigration policies of the two countries began to diverge considerably: the United States stressing family reunification and Canada stressing skills. This paper shows that the...

This paper measures and compares the relative earnings of French and English speakers in Canada, and of Spanish and English speakers in the U.S., in the 1970s and 1980s. In Canada, the earnings gap between French and English speakers narrowed over time, especially in Quebec. This decline appears...

This paper attempts to measure and explain recent changes in the distributions of family income in Canada and the U.S. using comparable micro-data for the two countries for 1979 and 1987. Three main sets of conclusions are reached. First, the distributions of total family income (pre-tax,...

This paper documents the striking difference in U. S. and Canadian poverty trends from 1970 to 1986. While U.S. poverty has shown no consistent trend since 1970, Canadian poverty decreased by 60%. This paper examines why U. S. and Canadian poverty trends differed during two periods: 1970-1979...

In comparing Canada with the U.S., we first simulate the U.S. demographic transition, treating the U.S. as a closed economy. The time path of interest rates obtained from the U.S. simulations are then used in the Canadian simulations. In the Canada simulations, Canada is assumed to be an open...

We study the effects of import and export competition on collectively bargained wage settlements and bargaining unit employment from the sixties to the mid-eighties for the United States and Canada. Both value-based and pricebased measures of international competition are considered. We...