This paper contributes to the analysis of the integration of immigrants in the Canadian labour market by focusing in two relatively new dimensions. We combine the large samples of the restricted version of the Canadian Census (1991-2006) with both a novel measure of linguistic proximity of the...

We use data from the Canadian Workplace and Employee Survey (1999-2002) to assess the take-up of family-friendly benefits that are provided by employers. We distinguish between availability and actual use of benefits to account for worker selection into firms according to benefit availability....

This paper explores the fertility patterns of immigrant children to Canada using the 20 percent sample of the Canadian Census from 1991 through 2006. Fertility increases with age at immigration, with a sharp rise for those immigrating in their late teens and this pattern is similar for all...

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...

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...

In this paper we first analyze the determinants of training using data from the 2003 International Adult Literacy and Skills Survey (IALSS). We find that education plays a key role in the receipt of all forms of training except in the case of employer-sponsored training. We also find substantial...

Student loan programs are an important feature of post-secondary education systems around the world. However, there is little direct evidence on whether these programs are effective in increasing enrolments of credit constrained students. Unlike other countries, Canada has a system of student...

We show that among workers whose network is weaker than formal (nonnetwork) channels, those finding a job through the network should have higher wages than those finding a job through formal channels. Moreover, this wage differential is decreasing in network strength. We test these implications...

A vast literature has examined the impact of family income on the health and development outcomes of children. One channel through which increased income may operate is an improvement in a family’s ability to provide food, shelter, clothing, books, and other expenditure-related inputs to...

We utilize an instrumental variable approach to analyse the effect that dropping out of high school has on 17 outcomes pertaining to wages, employment and subsequent skill acquisition for youths. Our analysis is based on the older cohort of the Youth in Transition Survey (YITS) for 2003, an...