Research on sex differences in humans documents gender differences in sensory, motor and spatial aptitudes. These aptitudes, as captured by Dictionary of Occupational Titles (DOT) codes, predict the occupational choices of men and women in the directions indicated by this research. We simulate...

Sports participation is a leading environmental explanation of the male advantage in some spatial skills. We exploit the large increase in females' high school sports participation due to Title IX to test this hypothesis. We relate Title IX induced increases in females' sport participation to...

We revisit the US evidence of the association of height with socioeconomic status. We document non linear height profiles that are different for males and females. For males the profile is a spline function with a single node at mean height. Below mean height there is a sharply positive slope...

I examine the effects of the introduction of the Spouse's Allowance to the Canadian Income Security (IS) system on the retirement behavior of couples. This program was effectively targeted at females in couples attempting to live on a single pension. It allowed qualifying spouses to receive the...

Mortality is a crucial indicator of wellbeing and recent mortality trends have been a subject of public debate in many Western countries. This paper compares mortality inequality in Canada and the U.S. over the period 1990/91 through 2010/11. In Canada, mortality inequality remained constant...

Past research has demonstrated that positive increments to the non-cognitive development of children can have long-run benefits. We test the symmetry of this contention by studying the effects of a sizeable negative shock to non-cognitive skills due to the introduction of universal child care in...

Drawing on administrative records of nearly 4 million births in Canada as well as macro data from the US and Australia, we provide a comprehensive account of rising C-section rates. We explicitly consider the contributions of the changing characteristics of mothers, births, and physicians as...

Maternity leaves can affect mothers' and infants' welfare if they first affect the amount of time working women stay at home post birth. We provide new evidence of the labor supply effects of these leaves from an analysis of the introduction and expansion of job-protected maternity leave in...

Marriage penalties are a controversial feature of many government policies. Empirical evidence of their behavioral effects is quite mixed. This is surprising because economic theory predicts that they should have an impact on the headship decision. We investigate the removal of marriage...

Like most other developed nations, Canada has a large income security system for retirement that provides significant and widely varying disincentives to work at older ages. Empirical investigation of their effects has been hindered by lack of appropriate data. We provide an empirical analysis...