This study investigates the causal effects of education on individuals’ adaptability to employment shocks. Specifically, we assess the extent to which education influences re-employment success for unemployed workers. We also examine the impact of education on job search intensity, one...

The central objective of this study is to investigate the income sources and patterns of prime-age and older workers who suffer a layoff from steady employment. We focus on a set of cohorts who are deemed to have a high degree of attachment to the labour force preceding the event of an...

Using new data from Statistics Canada, the paper shows that the productivity performance of the business sector of the Canadian economy has been reasonably satisfactory over the past 46 years. In particular, traditional gross income Total Factor Productivity (TFP) growth averaged 1.14 percentage...

This paper provides a brief introduction to a proposed new opportunity cost treatment of owner occupied housing in measures of inflation for the United States. In addition, the paper introduces, and provides links to, a collection of nine other papers that discuss various aspects of the...

Van Veelen and van der Weide (2008) in a recent paper provided some interesting new perspectives on the index number problem. However, the present paper argues that their definitions of a true index and an exact index are different from the standard definitions in the literature. The differences...

The paper reviews some of the measurement problems that are associated with measuring sectoral Total Factor Productivity growth rates. The paper notes that the production accounts in the present System of National Accounts (SNA) need to be extended somewhat in order to be suitable as a data base...

Statistical agencies in different nations usually use the rental equivalence approach to the treatment of housing in their CPIs but a few countries use the user cost approach. The paper argues that an opportunity cost approach is the correct theoretical framework for accounting for OOH in a CPI....

The paper reviews and extends the theory of exact and superlative index numbers. Exact index numbers are empirical index number formula that are equal to an underlying theoretical index, provided that the consumer has preferences that can be represented by certain functional forms. These exact...

This paper examines the evolution of the returns to human capital in Canada over the period 1980-2006. Most of the analysis is based on Census data, and on weekly wage and salary earnings of full-time workers. Our main finding is that the returns to education increased substantially for Canadian...

Tang and Wang provided a decomposition of economy wide labour productivity into sectoral contribution effects. The present note reworks their methodology to provide a more transparent and simple decomposition. This new decomposition is then related to another decomposition due to Gini and...