The Local Average Treatment Effect (LATE) interpretation of the IV estimates of the returns to schooling is becoming increasingly popular. Typically, researchers reporting LATE estimates do not provide systematic evidence that there is substantial heterogeneity across different ability levels in...

This paper provides new evidence of gender differences in response to increased competition, focusing on important life tasks performed in a regular social environment. The analysis takes advantage of a major education reform in Ontario that exogenously increased competition for university...

Using the Amercian General Social Survey, we explore the link between union membership and perceived job insecurity. This finding is mainly atributed to the primary and secondary sectors and for recessionary periods. Instrumental-variables estimation and the use of attitudinal proxy variables...

In this paper, I use data from the Canadian Labour Force Surveys (LFS), and the 2001 and 2006 Canadian Censuses to estimate the impact of an important labor supply shock on the earnings of young high-school graduates. The abolition of Ontario’s Grade 13 generated a ‘double’...

This paper provides new evidence of gender differences in response to increased competition, focusing on important life tasks performed in a regular social environment. The analysis takes advantage of a major education reform in Ontario that exogenously increased competition for university...

This paper examines the implication of the decision to give 2006 Census respondent the option of letting Statistics Canada access their income tax files rather than answering income related questions directly. We find that giving respondents the option to share their income tax files (or not)...

Numerous studies suggest that the value of high school education is large for potential dropouts, yet we know much less about the benefits for students who will go on to postsecondary education. To help fill this gap I measure, using a recent Ontario high school reform, the valueadded (in terms...

Using Canadian time use data, we exploit variation in local unemployment rates to investigate the cyclical nature of sleep time and show that for both men and women, sleep time decreases when the economy is doing relatively better. Our results suggest that in a recession Canadians sleep an...

In this paper, we analyze the workings of a small-scale program involving foundational learning that is targeted at unemployed workers in Surrey, BC by exploiting information contained in the administrative data set that was compiled through its execution. Although this data set contains huge...

Using the American General Social Survey covering the period 1978-2008, the authors investigate the link between union membership and perceived job insecurity. They find that overall, union members are 3.5 percentage points more likely than non-union members to feel insecure about their current...