This paper examines the extent to which the relationship between participation in post-secondary education and family background, namely parental income and parental education changed between 1993 and 2001. The results support a long-standing pattern that university participation rates are...

This study examines retirement issues for older working Canadians: income, pension coverage, home ownership status, immigration status, marital status and self-assessed health. It uses data from the 2002 General Social Survey.

Past research has shown that the Canadian pension system is relatively effective in helping seniors to stay out of poverty. However, the extent to which the pension system enables individuals and families to maintain living standards achieved during their working years after retirement (income...

Two quasi-experiments are used to estimate the impact of parental divorce on the adult incomes and labour market behaviour of adolescents, as well as on their use of social programs, and their marital/fertility behaviour. These involve the use of individuals experiencing the death of a parent,...

In the past, working-age immigrant families in Canada's large urban centres had higher homeownership rates than the Canadian-born. Over the past twenty years however, this advantage has reversed, due jointly to a drop in immigrant rates and a rise in the popularity of homeownership among the...

We investigate how family earnings instability has evolved between the late 1980s and the late 1990s and how family income instability varies across segments of the (family-level) earnings distribution. We uncover four key patterns. First, among the subset of families who were intact over the...

We examine the evolution of low-paid work and the position of economically vulnerable families in Canada over the last two decades. Despite substantial growth in workers' educational attainment and experience, the proportion of jobs paying less than $10.00 per hour has remained fairly stable...

In this paper, we revisit trends in low-income among Canadian children by taking advantage of recent developments in the measurement of low-income intensity. We focus in particular on the Sen-Shorrocks-Thon (SST) index and its elaboration by Osberg and Xu. Low-income intensity declined in the...

The economic assimilation of immigrants is a key concern for economists and policy makers. The topic has been widely explored in terms of earnings assimilation of immigrants. Using the 1999 Survey of Financial Security, this study attempts to look at the issue from the wealth perspective....