We examine the impact of high school graduation on the probability individuals from welfare backgrounds use welfare themselves. Our data consists of administrative educational records for grade 12 students in a Canadian province linked with their own and their parents' welfare records. We...

Welfare caseloads in North America halved following reforms in the 1990s and 2000s. We study how this shift affected families by linking Canadian welfare records to tax returns, medical spending, educational attainment, and crime data. We find substantial and heterogeneous employment responses...

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...

I undertake a political economy exercise of a type described in John Rawls' A Theory of Justice; namely, one in which economic institutions are judged by how well they match the key principles in theories of distributive justice. My main contention is that such an exercise is integrally related...

Considering immigrant earnings in the context of post-arrival human capital investment implies: cohort quality should be defined in terms of the present value of the whole earnings profile; and, an appropriate definition of macro effects is obtained using the earnings profile of the native born...

Numerous studies conclude that ethnic/cultural/racial diversity has negative impacts on interpersonal trust and support for redistributive social programs. Although some Canadian public opinion data is consistent with this view, whether these impacts on public opinion are important enough to...

We use a large, rich Canadian micro-level dataset to examine the channels through which family socio-economic status and unobservable characteristics aff ect children's decisions to drop out of high school. First, we document the strength of observable socio-economic factors: our data suggest...

We investigate differences in quit, layoff and hiring rates in high versus low minimum wage regimes using Canadian data spanning 1979 to 2008. The data include consistent questions on job tenure and reason for job separation for the whole period. Over the same time frame, there were over 140...

We examine the setting of minimum wages, arguing that they can best be understood as a reflection of voters' notions of fairness. We arrive at this conclusion through an empirical investigation of the implications of three models, considered in the context of policy setting by sub-units in a...