Once a business opts to purchase rather than produce an input, it can also change the source from which the product is procured. Producer price index programs face problems in dealing with price changes associated with sourcing changes. We present measures for price index bias due to sourcing...

We examine the evolution of the returns to human capital in Canada over the period 1980-2005. Our main finding is that returns to education increased substantially for Canadian men, contrary to conclusions reached previously. Most of this rise took place in the early 1980s and since 1995....

This paper studies the role played by linguistic enclaves on the economic integration of immigrants to Canada. Linguistic enclaves are defined as groups of people who are similar with respect to languages used on their jobs. A five category classification of major types of linguistic enclaves is...

Using Statistics Canada’s Longitudinal Worker File, we document short-term and long-term earnings losses for a large (10%) sample of Canadian workers who lost their job through firm closures or mass layoffs during the late 1980s and the 1990s. Our use of a nationally representative sample...

Using data from a large Canadian longitudinal dataset, we examine whether earnings of wives and teenagers increase in response to layoffs experienced by husbands. We find virtually no evidence of an “added worker effect†for the earnings of teenagers. However, we find that among...

Separate identification of the price and quantity of human capital has important implications for understanding key issues in economics. Price and quantity series are derived for four education levels. The price series are highly correlated and they exhibit a strong secular trend. Three...

In this paper, we show that the decline in the relative wages of immigrants in Canada is far from homogenous over different points of the wage distribution. The well-documented decline in the immigrant-Canadian born mean wage gap hides a much larger decline at the low end of the wage...

This study uses longitudinal IMDB micro data to document the annual earnings outcomes of Canadian immigrants in four major admission categories (skill-assessed independent economic principal applicants, accompanying economic immigrants, family class immigrants, and refugees) and three annual...

Higher income neighbourhoods in Canada’s eight largest cities flourished economically during the past quarter century, while lower income communities stagnated. This paper identifies some of the underlying processes that led to this outcome. Increasing family income inequality drove much...

This paper examines how middle-class earnings in Canada have changed between 1970 and 2005 using Census microdata. Middle-class earnings are defined as workers’ earnings between 50 and 150 percent of the median or as earnings between the 20th and 80th percentile earnings. The analysis...