Individuals who enter the labour market with relatively low levels of education often find that they lack the necessary human capital and credentials needed to adapt to the rapidly changing labour market in Canada. The severe recession of the early 1980s and early 1990s coupled with the...

Toute personne entrant sur le marché du travail avec un niveau scolaire relativement faible découvre souvent qu’il lui manque le capital humain et les diplômes nécessaires pour s’adapter au marché du travail qui change rapidement au Canada. La grave récession des débuts des années...

We use a large, rich Canadian micro-level dataset to examine the channels through which family socio-economic status and unobservable characteristics affect children's decisions to drop out of high school. First, we document the strength of observable socio-economic factors: our data suggest...

This paper uses data from the 1979 and 1997 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth cohorts(NLSY79 and NLSY97) to estimate changes in the effects of ability and family income on educational attainment for youth in their late teens during the early 1980s and early 2000s. Cognitive ability plays an...

In this paper, we estimate the determinants of low (and slow) completion rates with a competing risk duration model using data from the National Apprenticeship Survey (NAS) 2007. This allows us to distinguish the impact age and duration dependence on the probability of dropping out. We find...

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...

In this paper, we analyze the workings of a small-scale program involving foundational learning that is targeted at unemployed workers in Surrey, BC by exploiting information contained in the administrative data set that was compiled through its execution. Although this data set contains huge...

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...

In fuzzy regression discontinuity (FRD) designs, the treatment effect is identified through a discontinuity in the conditional probability of treatment assignment. We show that when identification is weak (i.e. when the discontinuity is of a small magnitude) the usual t-test based on the FRD...