Research

Using data from the Canadian Employer-Employee Dynamics Database between 2001 and 2015, we examine the impact of firms' hiring and pay-setting policies on the gender earnings gap in Canada. Consistent with the existing literature and following Card, Cardoso, and Kline (2016), we find that firm-specific premiums explain nearly one quarter of the 26.8% average earnings gap between female and male workers. On average, firms' hiring practices – due to difference in the relative proportion of women hired at high-wage firms, or sorting – and pay-setting policies – due to differences in pay by gender within similar firms – each explain about one half of this firm effect. The compositional difference between the two channels varies substantially over the life-cycle, by parental and marital status, and across provinces.

Working-age individuals are under growing pressure to contribute unpaid time to the care of elderly family members and friends. Existing work has generally found informal care to negatively impact labour market outcomes, an effect that varies considerably by caregiving intensity, as defined by average hours of care or co-residence with the care receiver. I construct a new measure of caregiving intensity based on the length of caregiving spells. To do so, I use the Longitudinal and International Study of Adults, which provides data on the monthly caregiving status of respondents over a six-year period. I investigate how this dimension of caregiving intensity intersects with better-known measures, and show that results relying on the latter conceal substantial heterogeneity in the impact of caregiving on employment. These differences are particularly important to understand disparities in the impact of caregiving on female and male employment.

This paper documents two COVID-related risks, viral risk and employment risk, and their distributions across the Canadian population. The measurement of viral risk is based on the VSE COVID Risk/Reward Assessment Tool, created to assist policymakers in determining the impacts of economic shutdowns and re-openings over the course of the pandemic. We document that women are more concentrated in high viral risk occupations and that this is the source of their greater employment loss over the course of the pandemic so far. They were also less likely to maintain one form of contact with their former employers, reducing employment recovery rates. Low educated workers face the same virus risk rates as high educated workers but much higher employment losses. Based on a rough counterfactual exercise, this is largely accounted for by their lower likelihood of switching to working from home which, in turn, is related to living conditions such as living in crowded dwellings. For both women and the low educated, existing inequities in their occupational distributions and living situations have resulted in them bearing a disproportionate amount of the risk emerging from the pandemic. Assortative matching in couples has tended to exacerbate risk inequities.

The extent to which K-12 schools should remain open is at the forefront of discussions on long-term pandemic management. In this context, there has been little mention of the immediate importance of K-12 schooling for the rest of the economy. Eliminating in-person schooling reduces the amount of labour time parents of school-aged children have available to work, and therefore reduces income to those workers and the economy as a whole. We discuss two measures of economic importance, and how they can be modified to better reflect the vital role played by K-12 education. The first is its size, as captured by the fraction of GDP that is produced by that sector. The second is its centrality, reflecting how essential a sector is to the network of economic activity. Using data from Canada’s Census of Population and Symmetric Input-Output Tables, we show how accounting for this role dramatically increases the importance of K-12 schooling.

Canadian children experience a high level of intergenerational income mobility compared with US children. Moreover, their physical and mental health outcomes, school readiness, and post-secondary attendance are all less tightly associated with parental outcomes than in the United States. In this article, we investigate the role played by children’s education in the intergenerational transmission of income in Canada. Existing research has produced macro-level estimates of mobility to draw comparisons over time and across places and has studied the micro-level mechanisms that underlie the relationship between parents’ and children’s outcomes. However, evidence on the extent to which the different factors investigated drive the broader numbers is still limited. To remedy this, we exploit the Longitudinal and International Study of Adults, a rich panel of integrated survey and administrative data covering 1982–2013. We estimate that the education level of children accounts for 40.5–50.1 percent of the correlation between their income and their parents’, similar to the United States. Moreover, we discuss evidence suggesting that the greater mobility of Canadian children is linked not only to their lower returns to education but also to the weaker association between their education and their parents’ income. Finally, we find that almost half of the effect linked to education is associated with the skills respondents use at work, such as reading or communication.

Mental health is increasingly recognized as a key component of human capital formation among children. In this paper, I study the impact of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) on children's health and educational outcomes, and the role that service provision through the health care and education systems can play in determining these outcomes. While there exists compelling evidence on the impact of ASD on children's outcomes and on the effect of various treatment options, this research is largely based on small-scale studies which tend to focus on few outcomes, are limited in their ability to control for child and family characteristics, and consider treatment options in isolation. In contrast, I use a rich data environment which includes information for the universe of individuals who lived in British Columbia, Canada, between 1991 and 2017. To evaluate the impact of service provision on children with ASD, I exploit a 2006 reform which was designed to uniformize health care diagnostic services across the province. In regions that were disproportionately affected by the change, I find that there was a decrease in access to ASD diagnoses, but an increase in ASD designations in the education system. This had ambiguous repercussions on children's health, and led to a decrease in their standardized test scores.

How does welfare affect the prosperity of mothers and their children? We study this question using a Canadian welfare reform and by linking administrative welfare records to tax returns, nearly all medical spending, and children's educational attainment. Eighty percent of mothers in the complier group found employment within a year, and for many, total income rose despite reduced transfers. We find precise zero effects on total health expenditures for both mothers and children. However, composition changes, including fewer family physician visits, indicate that mothers had less time to seek health care. We find precise zero effects on children's test scores and graduation, but modest reductions of intergenerational transmission of welfare. 

In this paper, I develop and estimate a model of life-cycle labour supply that incorporates the role of divorce. To do so, I set a collective model of household decision-making in an intertemporal context. The reduced-form literature has produced contradictory results on the effect of divorce and divorce risk on women's labour decisions. My model provides a unifying framework within which to view these findings. It also contributes to the structural literature, which has mostly studied how divorce alters bargaining power in marriage, and ignored women's insurance response to the risk of dissolution. I find that divorce risk shifts the lifetime expected income of married women, thus changing their labour in all periods. However, this effect is mitigated over time, as women stay in and learn about their marriage. Among women who do experience divorce, the event exacerbates pre-existing differences across marriages.

Administrative data sets have become increasingly popular sources of information to study mobility across generations. However, the inclusion of parent-child pairs depends on the primary purpose for which the data was collected. In the case of tax records, both parents and children must have worked and filed their taxes, and the children's labour market entry must have happened before they left the parental home. This paper documents selection in samples of parent-child pairs constructed from personal income tax records from Canada, and discusses implications for intergenerational research. It takes advantage of the fact that Statistics Canada's Longitudinal and International Study of Adults (LISA) includes both survey and administrative data to inform the nature and severity of the resulting sample selection. Results show that respondents who were successfully linked to their parents are more educated, and are more likely to have grown up in better educated, nuclear families. However, correcting for sample selection suggests that there is no bias in unadjusted estimates. 

We exploit the Longitudinal Administrative Databank (LAD) to study the evolution of wealth inequality in Canada, from 1982 to 2011. Until now, research has relied largely on the Survey of Financial Security and its predecessors. Although an invaluable resource, this data set has sporadic coverage, under-coverage at the top of the wealth distribution, and a small sample size. We use the income capitalization method to take advantage of the higher-frequency data and large sample size provided by the LAD. Consistent with existing work, we find that the top 10% share was fairly constant over the period considered. However, our results differ in that we observe that the top 1% share grew moderately but steadily between 1995 and 2007.

This study investigates the suitability of Canada's Longitudinal and International Study of Adults (LISA) for research on intergenerational income mobility. The LISA combines survey data, collected biennially since 2012, and the personal income tax records of both respondents and their past and present family members. In comparison, existing work on intergenerational mobility in Canada has often used the Intergenerational Income Database (IID), a purely administrative dataset based on the universe of tax filers. The IID's size has allowed researchers to describe the experience of mobility of narrowly defined geographic units and cohorts. However, its potential to investigate the mechanisms underlying these patterns is limited, given the small set of variables it informs. As such, the LISA is a promising candidate to further our understanding of the drivers of mobility. This study reproduces the analysis from four key papers that have documented the intergenerational transmission of income in Canada using the IID. Despite having a much smaller sample size and a different approach to the establishment of parent-child links, it finds that the LISA produces results that are consistent with the existing literature. This study also explores the sensitivity of rank-rank estimates to the choice of different specification and present results that will guide the methodological choices to be made by users of the LISA intergenerational family files in combination with LISA variables from the survey data.