This paper considers a model of a rating agency with multiple clients. Each client has a separate market (end-user of the rating); the only connection among them is that the underlying qualities of the clients are correlated. In the benchmark case of individual rating, the market for each client...

We develop a model of the labor market where firms incur an adjustment cost when one of their workers quits, and males and females form households assortatively by skill. We show how this environment can lead to an economy where females earn less and drop out more frequently than equally skilled...

The paper proves existence of equilibrium in a fairly general version of the pre-marital investment game. The game has discontinuous payoffs, so the method of Reny (1999) is used. Three assumptions are imposed on the matching process that occurs after investments are realized. It must be...

This paper studies an internet trading mechanism similar to the one described in Peters and Severinov (2000) in a market where traders values are interdependent. Conditions are given for which this mechanism has a perfect Bayesian equilibrium which supports allocations that are the same as the...

This paper studies the incidence and duration of unemployment in Canada at an aggregate and a number of disaggregated levels with data from the Canadian Labour Force Survey covering 1976 to 2006. The principal empirical findings indicate that most of the changes in steady state unemployment...

In this paper we first analyze the determinants of training using data from the 2003 International Adult Literacy and Skills Survey (IALSS). We find that education plays a key role in the receipt of all forms of training except in the case of employer-sponsored training. We also find substantial...

Student loan programs are an important feature of post-secondary education systems around the world. However, there is little direct evidence on whether these programs are effective in increasing enrolments of credit constrained students. Unlike other countries, Canada has a system of student...

We show that among workers whose network is weaker than formal (nonnetwork) channels, those finding a job through the network should have higher wages than those finding a job through formal channels. Moreover, this wage differential is decreasing in network strength. We test these implications...

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...

We utilize an instrumental variable approach to analyse the effect that dropping out of high school has on 17 outcomes pertaining to wages, employment and subsequent skill acquisition for youths. Our analysis is based on the older cohort of the Youth in Transition Survey (YITS) for 2003, an...