In this study I examine the effects of government subsidies to employer-provided health insurance on the decision to purchase insurance, and on utilization of publicly funded health services. Using unique variation in tax subsidies across Canadian provinces as an instrument, I estimate the...

The personal income tax systems in Canada, the United States, and elsewhere permit deductions or tax credits for out-of-pocket health care expenditures and private medical insurance premiums. Little is known about the effects of such tax measures on individual behaviour, in contrast to the...

Universality is a hallmark of Canadian social policy for very young children. The evidence base for these policies is small, non-experimental, and offers mixed results. In contrast, the evidence base for targeted early childhood interventions is largely experimental and offers strong guidance....

The authors examine the male/female earnings differential between 1970 and 1990. Their objective is to provide consistent estimates that can be compared and interpreted over time, and to assess the sensitivity of their results to alternative specifications. The authors find that women made...

Canada has a large Income Security system for retirement that provides significant and widely varying disincentives to work at older ages.We provide an empirical analysis of the retirement incentives of the Canadian Income Security system using a newadministrative database.We find that the work...

Many jurisdictions ban teacher strikes on the assumption that they negatively affect student achievement, but there is surprisingly little research on this question. The majority of existing studies make crosssection comparisons of the achievement of students who do or do not experience a...

In this paper, we provide a comprehensive picture, circa the late 1980s, of occupational gender segregation in Canada and its consequences for wages. Our analysis reveals sensitivity of the estimated penalty to "female work" to both specification and estimation strategy. Our preferred estimates...

We document the application of pro-active pay equity legislation to the private sector of the Canadian province of Ontario in the early 1990s. We report substantial lapses in compliance among smaller firms where the majority of men and women work. We also find that the pay equity law had no...