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...

In this paper I estimate the magnitude of earnings losses faced by workers who are displaced when over the age of 50. This is potentially complicated by the self-selection of older individuals out of the labour force and into activities such as retirement, preventing observation of their...

This paper proposes a new framework to empirically assess the effects of the minimum wage in a developing country. This approach allows us to jointly estimate the effects of the minimum wage on unemployment, average wages, sector mobility, wage inequality, the size of the informal sector and on...

This paper uses the Canadian Labour Force Survey to understand why the level and dispersion of wages have evolved differently across provinces from 1997 to 2013. The starker interprovincial differences are the much faster increase in the level of wages and decline in wage dispersion in...

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...

This paper examines the role of EI in providing support to “displaced workers,†those who permanently lose their jobs because of changing circumstances. Adjusting to change benefits Canadians as a whole. However, some workers suffer much more from job loss than do others. Those who...

This paper studies the incidence and duration of unemployment in Canada at an aggregate and a number of disaggregated levels with data from the Canadian Labour Force Survey covering 1976 to 2006. The principal empirical findings indicate that most of the changes in steady state unemployment...