More females than males have been attending Canadian universities over the past decade and this gender imbalance in university participation has been increasing. We use the Linear Probability and Logit models to investigate the determinants of attending university and explore the reasons for the...

We examine wage-change distributions in Canadian union contracts for evidence of downward nominal wage rigidity. Its probability increases substantially during low-inflation periods. During such periods, we discern no reduction in the incidence of real wage cuts. However, their magnitude is...

The decision to attend university is influenced by the balance of the expected returns and costs of attending university, by liquidity constraints and capital market imperfections that may modify these calculations and, hence, by the family income of prospective students. Family circumstances...

We consider and attempt to understand the gender wage gap across 26 European countries, using 2007 data from the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions. The size of the gender wage gap varies considerably across countries, definitions of the gap, and selection-correction...

In a country with two official languages, such as Canada, the demand for bilingualism may lead individuals born with one mother tongue to acquire the second official language. Knowledge of an additional official language may be associated with enhanced earnings for two reasons; its actual value...

Does bank market power affect firm performance? We answer this question by examining 25,236 syndicated loan facilities granted between 2000 and 2010 by 296 banks to 9,029 US non-financial firms. Even though recently poorly-performing firms obtain loans from banks with more market power, we find...

This paper proposes a labour supply function that allows not only for backward-bending behaviour at high but also for forward-falling behaviour at low wage rates. The proposed model adheres to the fundamentals of consumer theory and encompasses all well-known and widely used semi-log labour...

It is known that multidimensional Downsian competition fails to admit an equilibrium in pure strategies unless very stringent conditions on the distribution of voters’ bliss points are imposed (Plott 1967). This paper revisits this problem considering that the two vote share maximizing...

A controversial issue in the US is how to reduce the number of illegal immigrants and what effect this would have on the US economy. To answer this question we set up a two-country model with search in labor markets and featuring legal and illegal immigrants among the low skilled. We calibrate...

This paper employs the theory of strategic market games (enhanced with a spatial dimension) in order to study the issue of market location in a perfectly competitive setup. In this framework, each player decides strategically where and what quantities she wishes to trade and, hence, the market...