This paper analyzes the magnitude and sources of long-term earnings declines associated with graduating from college during a recession. Using a large longitudinal university-employer-employee dataset, we find that the cost of recessions for new graduates is substantial and unequal. Unlucky...

There is a general sense that the 1990s labour market was unique. It has been characterized by notions such as "downsizing," "technological revolution," "the knowledge-based economy," "rising job instability," and so on. This paper provides an extensive overview of the performance of the 1990s...

The standard neo-classical model of wage setting predicts short-term effects of temporary labor market shocks on careers and low costs of recessions for both more and less advantaged workers. In contrast, a vast range of alternative career models based on frictions in the labor market suggests...

Using data from the 1976-2001 Canadian Labour Force Survey, we examine the stability of currently held jobs and find no period-long drop in job stability. However, job stability declined across the 1980s and rose across the 1990s for workers with less than one year of tenure. When 1987 and 1995...

We develop a framework for the dynamic analysis of unemployment and use it to examine the difference in unemployment rates between Canada and the United States over the period 1980-1993. An examination of both the incidence and the duration of unemployment uncovers a series of stylized facts...

Our objective is to obtain an accurate estimate of the degree of intergenerational income mobility in Canada. We use income tax information on about 400,000 father-son pairs, and find intergenerational earnings elasticities to be about 0.2. Earnings mobility tends to be slightly greater than...