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.

The authors evaluate some explanations of immigrants' family labor-supply behavior. Upon arrival, immigrant husbands work less than natives but immigrant wives work more. A conventional labor-supply model uses wage assimilation to explain these differences but is not supported by the data. More favorable results are obtained for the 'family investment model, ' in which wives in immigrant families take on 'dead-end' jobs to finance their husbands' investments in human capital. The authors conclude that family composition is an important correlate of immigrants' assimilation and the family investment model can account for many of the patterns in the data. Copyright 1997 by American Economic Association.

Women's Wages in Women's Work: A U.S./Canada Comparison of the Roles of Unions and "Public Goods" Sector Jobs by Michael Baker and Nicole M. Fortin. Published in volume 89, issue 2, pages 198-203 of American Economic Review, May 1999

The growing labor force participation of women with small children in both the U.S. and Canada has led to calls for increased public financing for childcare. The optimality of public financing depends on a host of factors, such as the “crowd-out ” of existing childcare arrangements, the impact on female labor supply, and the effects on child well-being. The introduction of highly-subsidized universally-accessible childcare in Quebec in the late 1990s provides an opportunity to address these issues. We carefully analyze the impacts of Quebec’s “five dollar per day childcare ” program on childcare utilization, labor supply, and child (and parent) outcomes among two-parent families. We find strong evidence of a shift into new childcare use, although approximately one third of the newly reported use appears to come from women who previously worked and had informal arrangements. The labor supply impact is highly significant, and comparable in magnitude to previous credible estimates. Finally, we uncover evidence that children are worse off in a variety of behavioral and health dimensions, ranging from aggression to motor-social skills to illness. Our analysis also suggests that the new childcare program led to more hostile, less consistent parenting, worse parental health, and lower-quality parental relationships.