Using U.S. panel data on adult males, I compare the "profile heterogeneity model" of earnings dynamics, in which the earnings/experience profile varies across individuals, to a competing model in which earnings "has a unit root." The latter specification enjoys increasing popularity among researchers. My analysis questions this favor, suggesting the profile heterogeneity model provides a more consistent representation of the data. I also provide new estimates of the variation in earnings growth rates. Previous evidence is from relatively unrepresentative samples. Individuals one standard deviation above the mean enjoy a 20%-30% earnings advantage in just 10 years.

Using an extraordinary database drawn from longitudinal income tax records, we decompose Canada’s growth in earnings inequality into its persistent and transitory components. We find that the growth in earnings inequality reflects both an increase in long‐run inequality and an increase in earnings instability. The Canadian data strongly reject several restrictions commonly imposed in the U.S. literature, and they also suggest that imposing these evidently false restrictions may lead to distorted inferences about earnings dynamics and inequality trends.

We examine the impact of maternity leaves on the period mothers are away from work postbirth and the likelihood they return to their prebirth employer. We use the introduction and expansion of statutory job-protected maternity leave entitlements in Canada to identify these effects. We find that modest leave entitlements of 17-18 weeks do not change the amount of time mothers spend away from work. In contrast, longer leaves do have a substantive impact on behavior, leading to more time spent at home. We also find that all entitlements we examined increase job continuity with the prebirth employer. (c) 2008 by The University of Chicago.

We examine the (sequential) introduction of early retirement provisions to Canada's two public pension plans. These reforms provide a unique opportunity to assess the effect of public pension plan parameters on labor supply behavior, free of the biases that potentially affect the simple time‐series or cross‐section inference presented in many previous studies. We find that the reforms led to an increase in pension receipt but had little immediate effect on labor market behavior. This is due to the fact that men who initially took advantage of the early retirement provisions would otherwise have had limited labor market participation.

In this article, the authors examine the economic assimilation of immigrants to Canada. They provide new evidence on immigrants who arrived in the 1970s and document an increase in the dispersion of labor market outcomes across immigrants of different vintages over time. The authors' results confirm U.S. evidence of permanent differences across immigrant cohorts. What distinguishes the Canadian experience is small or negative rates of assimilation for most cohorts over the sample period. Finally, the authors test the overidentification of the assimilation process specified in previous studies and fail to reject the usual cohort fixed-effect specification. Copyright 1994 by University of Chicago Press.

In this paper we examine whether the requirements that workers must satisfy to qualify for unemployment insurance (UI) benefits in any succeeding period of joblessness affect the duration of employment spells. This behavioral consequence of a UI system has been neglected in empirical research, which has instead focused on the effects of UI parameters on the actions of the unemployed. The effect is identified by a unique change in the eligibility requirements of the Canadian UI system in 1990, which increased the weeks of employment required to establish UI eligibility. We provide a variety of estimates of this behavioral effect. In our preferred set of results, we find a significant increase in the employment hazard in the week that an individual satisfies the eligibility requirement in many regions of the country. In the spirit of Feldstein's (1976) study of temporary layoffs, the results provide new evidence of the impact of UI system parameters on the actions of employers and workers.

We investigate how reforms of Canada’s child allowances affected household poverty and maternal employment—the 2015 increase and expansion of the Universal Child Care Benefit and the 2016 introduction of a new Canada Child Benefit (CCB). We document that both reforms reduced child poverty, although the CCB had greater effect. By 2018, we estimate that the CCB reduced poverty by 11% in families headed by a single mother and by nearly 17% in two-parent families. We find no evidence, on either the extensive or the intensive margin, of a negative labor supply response to either of the program reforms.

We examine the effects of minimum wage legislation in Canada over the period 1975–93. For teenagers we find that a 10% increase in the minimum wage is associated with roughly a 2.5% decrease in employment. We also find that this result is driven by low frequency variation in the data. At high frequencies the elasticity is positive and insignificant. The difference in the elasticity across the bandwidth has implications for the interpretation of employment dynamics as a result of minimum wage policy and experimental design in minimum wage studies. It also provides a simple reconciliation of the “new minimum wage research,” which reports very small negative, or positive, elasticities.

Mortality is a crucial indicator of well-being, and recent mortality trends have been a subject of public debate in many Western countries. This paper compares mortality inequality in Canada and the United States over the period 1990/91 through 2010/11. In Canada, mortality inequality remained constant among the youngest but increased for men over 24 and women over 14. In contrast, in the United States, mortality inequality fell for children and youth and either modestly increased or held steady at older ages. By 2010/11, the initially higher US rates of infant and child mortality had almost converged to their Canadian counterparts.