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...

Studies based on instrumental variable techniques suggest that the value of a high school education is large for potential dropouts, yet we know much less about the size of the benefiÂ…t for students who will go on to post-secondary education. To help Â…fill this gap, I measure the...

En Amérique du Nord, les étudiants dont les parents ont émigré obtiennent en général un meilleur niveau d’études que ceux dont les parents sont nés au Canada. En Europe, on constate l’inverse. Au Canada, les étudiants de parents immigrants (de 1re ou de 2e génération) suivent des...

We investigate the effects of public school open enrolment, which allows students to enroll in any public school with available space, on fourth grade test scores. We find a small, positive effect on the average student; this benefit appears to stem from increased competition among schools,...

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...

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...

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...

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...