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...

Tight labour markets driven by resource booms could increase the opportunity cost of schooling and crowd out human capital formation. For oil producing economies like the Province of Alberta, the OPEC oil shocks of 1973 to 1981 may have had an adverse long term effect on the productivity of the...

Considerable concern has recently been expressed about growing income inequality. Much of the discussion, though, has been in general terms and focused on the U.S. experience. To understand whether and how Canada ought to respond to this development, we need to be clear on the facts. This paper...

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...

It is well documented that Aboriginal people generally have lower levels of educational attainment than other groups in Canada, but little is known about the reasons behind this gap. This study is the first of two by the same author investigating the issue in detail. This initial paper focuses...

Proponents of class size reductions draw heavily on the results from Project STAR to support their initiatives. Adding to the political appeal of these initiative are reports that minority and economically disadvantaged students received the largest benefits from smaller classes. We extend this...

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...

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...

This paper extends our understanding of the difference in university participation between students with and without immigrant backgrounds by contrasting outcomes in Switzerland and Canada, and by the use of new longitudinal data that are comparable between the countries. The research includes...

In North America, students with immigrant parents typically achieve higher levels of education than their counterparts with domestic-born parents. In Europe however, the opposite is typically true. In Canada, immigrants students (1st or 2nd generation) are 1.6 times as likely to attend...