This paper documents the life-cycle patterns of household portfolios in Canada, and investigates several hypotheses about asset accumulation and allocation. Inferences are drawn from the 1999 Survey of Financial Security, with some comparisons to earlier wealth surveys from 1977 and 1984. I find...

Variation in tax policy presents an opportunity to estimate the responsiveness of fertility to prices. This paper exploits the introduction of a pro-natalist transfer policy in the Canadian province of Quebec that paid up to C$8,000 to families having a child. I implement a quasi-experimental...

We find a steep earnings-longevity gradient using fifty years of administrative data from Canada, with men in the top ventile of earnings living eight years (11 percent) longer than those in the bottom ventile. For women, the difference is 3.6 years. Unlike the United States, this longevity...

Sex ratios at birth are above the biologically normal level in a number of Asian countries, notably India and China. Standard explanations include poverty and a cultural emphasis on male offspring. We study Asian immigrants to Canada using Census data, focussing on sex ratios across generations...

This is the introduction and summary to the fourth phase of an ongoing project on Social Security Programs and Retirement Around the World. The first phase described the retirement incentives inherent in plan provisions and documented the strong relationship across countries between social...

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 a...

We study the impact of maternal care on early child development using an expansion in Canadian maternity leave entitlements. Following the leave expansion, mothers who took leave spent between 48 and 58 percent more time not working in the first year of their children's lives. We find that this...

In this paper, we study how the portfolios of elderly U.S. households evolve after retirement, using data from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS). In particular, we investigate the influence of aging and health shocks on a household's ownership of various assets and on the dollar value and...

The growing labor force participation of women with small children in both the U.S. and Canada has led to calls for increased public financing for childcare. The optimality of public financing depends on a host of factors, such as the "crowd-out" of existing childcare arrangements, the impact on...

Maternity leaves can affect mothers' and infants' welfare if they first affect the amount of time working women stay at home post birth. We provide new evidence of the labor supply effects of these leaves from an analysis of the introduction and expansion of job-protected maternity leave in...