Using the native born as a benchmark, we examine immigrants' reliance on Canada's social safety net. Both in the raw data, and after conditioning on a variety of explanatory variables, we find that immigrants have lower participation rates in Unemployment Insurance and Social Assistance than...

We study the impact of maternal care on early child development using an expansion in Canadian maternity leave entitlements. Following the leave expansion, mothers who took leave spent 48–58 percent more time not working in their children’s first year of life. This extra maternal care...

Survey reports of the incidence of chronic conditions are considered by many researchers to be more objective, and thus preferable, measures of unobserved health status than self-assessed measures of global well being. In this paper we evaluate this hypothesis by attempting to validate these...

I examine the introduction of the Spouse's Allowance to the Canadian Income Security (IS) system. This program was nominally targeted at females in couples attempting to live on a single pension, allowing them to receive the age related benefits of the IS system at age 60, up to five years...