We explore the forces that shape the development of aspirations and the achievement of grades during high school and the role that these aspirations, grades, and other variables play in educational outcomes such as going to university and graduating. We find that parental expectations and peer...

We study the distortions that downward nominal and real wage rigidity would induce to a flexible form of a notional, rigidity-free, distribution of wage change using the histogram-location approach. We examine alternative methods of generating the histograms that support the econometric search...

More females than males have been attending Canadian universities over the past decade and this gender imbalance in university participation has been increasing. We use the Linear Probability and Logit models to investigate the determinants of attending university and explore the reasons for the...

An earlier study of wage agreements, reached in the Canadian unionized sector between 1976-99, found that wage adjustment is characterized by downward nominal rigidity and significant spikes at zero. We extend this earlier approach to encompass the possibility of real as well as nominal wage...

Theoretical work on indexation and contract duration suggests no role for the expected rate of inflation in equations explaining these variables. Yet, stand-alone or two-equation studies of indexation and contract duration often report that this variable is statistically significant. We study a...

We process information in a large number of wage contracts, signed over a period of several decades, to generate the long-run history of the real wage for each bargaining pair. We term these hitherto unexamined histories 'chronologies'. We are able to generate 1574 continuous real wage...

It is evident that a strong positive correlation persists between the educational attainment of parents and that of their children in many, if not most, populations. This relationship may form an important part of the phenomenon of low social mobility as well as inefficiently low investment in...

This paper estimates employment equations based on the traditional labour demand model and modern efficient bargain theory using data drawn from wage contracts signed in the Canadian private unionized sector between 1978 and 1984. Contrary to the labour demand model predictions, the alternative...

This paper studies the determinants of real wage rates using data on Canadian labour contracts signed between 1978 and 1984. Its results are consistent with Dunlop's neglected (1944) hypothesis that real pay movements are shaped by product price changes (contrary to the predictions of implicit...

We estimate the public-private sector pay gap for 27 European countries, using the 2008 EU SILC. The coefficients of conditional (on personal and job characteristics) public sector controls give a first impression on wage differences, while decompositions into explained and unexplained...