Proponents of class size reductions draw heavily on the results from Project STAR to support their initiatives. Adding to the political appeal of these initiative are reports that minority and economically disadvantaged students received the largest benefits from smaller classes. We extend this...

We utilize the 2000 cohort of university graduates from the National Graduate Survey (NGS) to estimate the extent to which the choice of field of study is influenced by expected returns to those fields of study. The expected returns are based on earnings equations estimated from the earlier 1990...

We utilize an instrumental variable approach to analyse the effect that dropping out of high school has on 17 outcomes pertaining to wages, employment and subsequent skill acquisition for youths. Our analysis is based on the older cohort of the Youth in Transition Survey (YITS) for 2003, an...

Tight labour markets driven by resource booms could increase the opportunity cost of schooling and crowd out human capital formation. For oil producing economies like the Province of Alberta, the OPEC oil shocks of 1973 to 1981 may have had an adverse long term effect on the productivity of the...

This paper contributes to the analysis of the integration of immigrants in the Canadian labour market by focusing in two relatively new dimensions. We combine the large samples of the restricted version of the Canadian Census (1991-2006) with both a novel measure of linguistic proximity of the...

Using longitudinal data for Canada, the probability of participating in employer supported course enrollment for mid career workers and the wage impacts of those adult educational investments are analyzed. Probability of participation in employer supported course enrollment is increasing with...

The earnings and occupational task requirements of immigrants to Canada are analyzed. The growing education levels of immigrants in the 1990s have not led to a large improvement in earnings as one might expect if growing computerization was leading to a rising return to non-routine cognitive...

We utilize the 2006 Census -- the first large-scale, representative Canadian data set to include information on apprenticeship certification -- to compare the returns from apprenticeships with those from other educational pathways (high school graduation, non-apprenticeship trades and community...