The implications of human capital portability - including interactions between education, language skills and pre- and post-immigration occupational matching - for earnings are explored for new immigrants to Canada. Given the importance of occupation-specific skills, as a precursor we also...

Two distinct issues are addressed. First, we explore earnings and employment outcome differences across categories of the immigrant selection system and directly link the points system to these outcomes, which is relatively rare in Canadian research. Second, the appropriateness of alternative...

We analyze the process of immigrant selection and occupational outcomes of International Medical Graduates (IMGs) in the US and Canada. We extend the IMG relicensing model of Kugler and Sauer (2005) to incorporate two different approaches to immigrant selection: employer nomination systems and...

We leverage a field experiment across three distinct school districts to identify key pieces of a structural model of adolescent human capital production. Our focus is inspired by the contemporary psychology of education literature, which expresses learning as a function of the ratio of the time...

The effect of incomplete markets on parental investments is investigated. Uninsured risk and credit constraints can distort the timing of parental investments, causing them to be delayed relative to what would occur under full-insurance. Age-dependent subsidies, taxes or transfers can all...

The relationships among geographical mobility, unemployment and the value of owner-occupied housing are studied in an economy with heterogeneous locations and search frictions in the markets for both labour and houses. Differences in labour market conditions between cities affect the speed with...

Targeted employment subsidy programs are commonly employed by governments. This study examines one such initiative that rebated unemployment insurance premiums for net new insurable employment for youth aged 18 to 24. Using microdata from two datasets to estimate the labour market impacts of...

We draw on Ricardian comparative advantage between distinct persons to map out the division of labor among proto-humans in a village some 1.7 million years ago. A person specialized in maintaining a cooking fire in the village is of particular interest (Ofek [2001]). We are also interested in...

Humans exhibit much more sharing of food harvested by prime-age hunter-gatherers with dependents relative to such sharing by lower-order primates. We investigate this behavior in a model in which a father provides generously to his dependent child-son in period t in the hope that this gesture...

This paper is a quantitative, equilibrium study of the insurance role of severance pay when workers face displacement risk and markets are incomplete. A key feature of our model is that, in line with an established empirical literature, job displacement entails a persistent fall in earnings upon...