This paper examines how changes in immigration policy levers actually affect the skill characteristics of immigrant arrivals using a unique Canadian immigrant landings database. We first review the Canadian experience with a point system as part of its immigrant policy. Section III of the paper...

Canada’s approach to immigration faces major challenges, and requires reform if Canada is to meet the international competition for skilled immigrants, according to a new policy study. In the Policy Study, the authors assess the strengths and weaknesses of the current point system used to...

As labour markets change, the question arises whether Canada’s immigration policy – and our “point system” in particular – is doing a good job of identifying potential immigrants who will fare well on arrival in Canada.

This paper provides the tools and procedures for empirically implementing several dominance criteria for social welfare comparisons and broad income inequality comparisons. Dominance criteria are expressed in terms of vectors of quantile ordinates based on income shares or quantile means....

This paper applies the tool box measures of disaggregative income inequality characterization and the statistical methodology of Beach (2021) to percentile-based distribution statistics such as quintile income shares and decile means typically published by official statistical agencies. It...

This paper offers a tool box of disaggregative measures of distributional change, including population shares, income shares, quantile mean incomes and relative mean incomes of different income groups. It highlights median-based measures along with quintiles and deciles. It also offers formulas...

This paper uses distribution-free formulas for the asymptotic variances of sample quantile income shares - as typically published by statistical agencies as measures of the distribution of income inequality - to calculate how large a survey sample must be in order to estimate a more refined...

This paper provides a set of tool box measures for flexibly describing distributional changes and empirically implementing several dominance criteria for social welfare comparisons and broad income inequality comparisons. Dominance criteria are expressed in terms of vectors of quantile...

Many historical comparisons of international productivity use measures of labour productivity (output per worker). Differences in labour productivity can be caused by differences in technical efficiency or differences in capital intensity. Moving to measures of total factor productivity allows...