Canadian apprenticeship policy has recently turned to direct subsidies for participants, including a federal tax incentive for employers. Some assumptions underlying the employer subsidy are: that apprenticeship training is a principal contributor to the skilled trades labour supply; that...

Selon de nombreuses recherches, il semble que les immigrants plus qualifiés, en particulier dans les domaines des sciences, de la technologie, de l’ingénierie et des mathématiques, sont non seulement plus innovateurs que leurs collègues nés au pays qui les a reçus, mais qu’ils ont...

A growing body of research suggests that skilled immigrants, particularly those in the “STEM†fields (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics), are not only more innovative than their native-born counterparts but also have the potential to produce positive productivity...

We compare literacy test scores and relative wage and employment outcomes of Australian, Canadian and U.S. immigrants using the 2003/2006 Adult Literacy and Life Skills Survey (ALLS). We find substantially higher immigrant skill levels at the lower end of the distribution in Australia,...

Research comparing the labour market performance of recent cohorts of immigrants to Australia and Canada points to superior employment and earnings outcomes in Australia. Examining Australian and Canadian Census data between 1986 and 2006, we find that this performance advantage is not driven by...

Ever since the seminal work of Stigler (1962), economists have recognized that information in markets is costly to acquire and can lead to “search frictionsâ€. The remarkable growth in online search has substantially lowered the cost of information acquisition. Despite this, there is...

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...

A detailed longitudinal dataset is assembled containing annual performance and biographical data for every player over the entire history of professional major league baseball. The data are then aggregated to the team level for the period 1920-2009 in order to test whether teams built on a more...

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...

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....