Embedded Files
Job Market Paper
Job Market Paper
Labour market concentration in Canada
I construct a measure of labour market concentration using employment shares computed from the Canadian Business Register from 2000 to 2020, documenting its level and changes and studying its implications for wages and employment using restricted Labour Force Survey data. Canadian labour markets, defined as 4-digit industry x geography (economic region), are just below the US Department of Justice's threshold for moderate concentration on average and trendless. However, concentration is moderate to high in less populous provinces and rising. I find that a 10% increase in concentration reduces wages by about 0.3% but raises the employment probability by twenty percentage points and the probability of being a recent hire by 14 percentage points. The wage effects are even larger for workers aged 55 to 64 or those with only high school diplomas. I do not observe any statistically significant effects of concentration on quit or layoff probability or actual hours worked. The positive effects on employment probability imply that concentration does not explain the minimum wage puzzle in Canada.
Publications
Publications
New Evidence on the Cyclicality of Employer-to-Employer Flows from Canada (with Alice Nakamura, Emi Nakamura, and Jón Steinsson)
AEA Papers and Proceedings, 2019.
This paper presents new estimates of gross worker flows for Canada for the sample period 1978 to 2016. We use administrative data from the Canadian Record of Employment in combination with the Canadian Labor Force Survey to estimate employer-to-employer flows in addition to flows between labor market states. We highlight three main results: Roughly two-thirds of all job separations are employer-to-employer flows. Employer-to-Employer flows are highly pro-cyclical. The combination of these two results implies that total job separations are pro-cyclical. If employer-to-employer flows improve match quality, our results imply that recessions have a sullying effect on the labor market.
Working papers
Working papers
Estimating the Net Benefits of Bachelor Degrees: Data Challenges and Importance (with Alice Nakamura, Arthur Sweetman, Philip Davidson, Kevin Lang and Leonard Nakamura)
Paper presented at IARIW 34th General Conference, Dresden, Germany, August 25, 2016
Now, as before, the available data show that those who earn at least a bachelor’s level university degree have higher earnings on average, and multiple other sorts of better labor market outcomes on average, than those with community college, technical school, or high school educations but no university degree. Yet calls for diverting more of those seeking university educations to alternative education programs or for changing how bachelor’s degrees are delivered are persistent and strong now. This paper explores the sorts of empirical evidence behind the calls for change, proposes an alternative explanation of the causes of the media reports and public attitudes toward research universities despite the evidence of job market success for graduates, and notes that the ways of dealing with this situation that could work differ depending on the causes. A list of types of initiatives that faculty members could take that might help is given.
Unions and Inequality Across the Wage Distribution: Evidence from Canada
North American private sector union membership slumped during the 1980s and 1990s, yet rising inequality has renewed interest in unionism. Unions remain prevalent in the public sector, and understanding the role they play in public sector wage setting may help answer whether unions can be an effective tool for combating inequality. However, the labor literature has tended to overlook advancements from inequality theory; first in that theoretically unsound measures that can incorrectly measure inequality are often used, and second in that any inequality statistic is necessarily most sensitive to a specific part of the distribution. I use the Generalized Entropy family of indices to address both points and show that unions have a stronger effect on inequality for low-wage public sector workers. However, the effects can give a misleading picture. Inequality is particularly high among low-wage non-union public sector workers compared to their private sector counterparts. Thus, a substantial portion of the public sector union effect is used to `catch up' with private sector inequality for low-wage workers. Conversely, for high-wage public sector workers, unions drive down a low inequality compared to their private sector counterparts. Another implication is that even if private sector union membership recovers, the inequality decrease for low-wage workers may be modest.
Worker Flows in Canada
Traditional measures of economic health, such as the unemployment rate, have been derived from stocks of workers. Movements in the underlying flows of workers between employment, unemployment, and being out of the labour force drive changes in these stocks. These flows receive less attention than stock-based measures, yet provide insights on economic health beyond what stocks can show. Employer-to-employer (EE) flows are particularly informative as they move workers to higher-paying positions and more productive firms, but do not change employment levels. In Canada, the Labour Force Survey is used to measure employer moves. However, I show undocumented inconsistencies in the key variable used to identify EE flows: job tenure. These inconsistencies bias EE flows towards zero. I correct for one of the inconsistencies and find that it increases EE flows by as much as 70%.
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