We empirically assess the effect of historical slavery on the African American family structure. Our hypothesis is that female single headship among blacks is more likely to emerge in association not with slavery per se, but with slavery in sugar plantations, since the extreme demographic and...

We measure the impact of individuals' looks on their life satisfaction or happiness. Using five data sets from the U.S., Canada, the U.K., and Germany, we construct beauty measures in different ways that allow putting a lower bound on the true effects of beauty on happiness. Personal beauty...

The intergenerational transmission of employers between fathers and sons is a common feature of labour markets in Canada and Denmark, with 30 to 40% of young adults having at some point been employed with a firm that also employed their fathers. This is strongly associated with the first jobs...

Understanding the causal impacts of taking youth on the margins of risk into foster care is an element of the evidence-base on which policy development for this crucial function of government relies. Yet, there is little research looking at these causal impacts; neither is there much empirical...

The main purpose of this paper is to estimate the size and the growth of Quebec's underground economy, and the corresponding loss of taxes for the government. Our approach is based on a method developed by Pissarides and Weber (1989) and extended by Lyssiotou et al. (2004). The basic hypothesis...

This paper is concerned with the production of PhDs in the United States and Canada in the post-WW II period, overall and by gender and major discipline. The effects of the explanatory variables lagged six years are consistent with the model. Military conscription with educational exemptions and...

In this paper, we estimate returns to classroom and on-the-job firm-sponsored training in terms of value-added per worker using longitudinal linked employee-employer Canadian data from 1999 to 2006. We estimate a standard production function controlling for endogenous training decisions because...

This paper examines the effectiveness of Canadian immigration policy by analyzing the differences in the returns to education between first, second and third generation immigrant men. Regression results indicate that the second generation with high school education and lower do not earn...

Although immigration has become a major growth factor for Canadian labour force, there is little economic research on the effect of immigration on native-born Canadians' labour market performance. This paper examines the relationship between changes in the share of immigrants by sub-labour...

This paper examines the speed of the occupational adjustment of immigrants using Labour Force Surveys 2004 and 2005 from Statistics Netherlands. The analysis provides new evidence that immigrants start with jobs at the lower levels of skill distribution. Their occupational achievement improves...