Drawing on recent historical institutionalist scholarship, this paper explores the debates leading to the enactment of the Canada/Quebec Pension Plans (C/Q.P.P.) in 1965. More specifically, this analysis underlines the respective role of and the interaction between political institutions,...

In 1975, 50 year-old Americans could expect to live slightly longer than their European counterparts. By 2005, American life expectancy at that age has diverged substantially compared to Europe. We find that this growing longevity gap is primarily the symptom of real declines in the health of...

The government of Canada is committed to closing the health status gap between First Nation’s (FN) and non-First Nation’s peoples in Canada. The government of Canada is also committed to evidenced-based policy making and accountability. To provide evidence of effective programming, it must...

This paper evaluates the impact of the 1995-1998 Ontario welfare reforms on the standard of living among single mothers. I look at how different measures of single mothers’ consumption vary in response to transfer income shocks. Because welfare is a provincial responsibility in Canada, this...

The federal government has implemented an earned income tax credit – what it has called the Working Income Tax Benefit – in the 2007 Budget. Edmund Phelps has argued that the earned income tax credit in the United States should be replaced with an employment subsidy. This paper assesses the...

The federal government has implemented an earned income tax credit what it has called the Working Income Tax Benefit in the 2007 Budget. Edmund Phelps has argued that the earned income tax credit in the United States should be replaced with an employment subsidy. This paper assesses the...

I investigate the role of education on health, using country level data and the production frontier framework suggested by the World Health Organization to assess performances of health care systems. I find that the role of human capital is much smaller than what appears in the WHO frontier...

An important demographic trend is the aging of the population. As a result, demand for health care services for the sick and elderly is likely to increase. Since care for the sick and elderly is often provided informally by family members, parental illness may have important implications for the...

The family investment hypothesis predicts that credit-constrained immigrant families adopt a household strategy for financing post-migration human capital investment in which the “primary worker” engages in investment activities and the other partner undertakes labor market activities which...

This paper considers for a Canadian national probability sample of middle-aged women and men the question of how typical is the experience of being "caught in the middle" between being the adult child of elderly parents and other roles. Three roles are examined: adult child, employed worker, and...