This paper uses detailed administrative data from one of the largest community colleges in the United States to quantify the extent to which academic performance depends on students being of similar race or ethnicity to their instructors. To address the concern of endogenous sorting, we use both...

We use a unique set of linked administrative data sets to explore the determinants of persistence and academic success in university. The explanatory power of high school grades greatly dominates that of other variables such as university program, gender, and neighbourhood and high school...

In this study, I estimate the impact of offering two large non-refundable grants to low-income Canadian youth on postsecondary attendance. The grants had two interesting features. First, they were clawed back from loans, thus reducing costs but providing no additional liquidity. Second, the...

Teacher strikes can have many of effects, including creating major inconveniences for parents, but the most contentious issue is undoubtedly the impact on student learning. The argument against teachers’ right to strike is based on the assumption that teacher strikes negatively affect...

Traditional index number theory decomposes a value ratio into the product of a price index times a quantity index. Growth accounting is based on this traditional approach to index number theory. This paper takes an alternative approach which decomposes a value difference into the sum of a price...

In many sectors of the economy, governments either provide various services at no cost or at highly subsidized prices. Examples are the health, education and general government sectors. The System of National Accounts 1993 recommends valuing these nonmarket outputs at their costs of production...

Using new data from Statistics Canada, the paper shows that the productivity performance of the business sector of the Canadian economy has been reasonably satisfactory over the past 46 years. In particular, traditional gross income Total Factor Productivity (TFP) growth averaged 1.14 percentage...

The paper reviews some of the measurement problems that are associated with measuring sectoral Total Factor Productivity growth rates. The paper notes that the production accounts in the present System of National Accounts (SNA) need to be extended somewhat in order to be suitable as a data base...

Tang and Wang provided a decomposition of economy wide labour productivity into sectoral contribution effects. The present note reworks their methodology to provide a more transparent and simple decomposition. This new decomposition is then related to another decomposition due to Gini and...