We examine the impact of public sector salary disclosure laws on university faculty salaries in Canada. The laws, which enable public access to the salaries of individual faculty if they exceed specified thresholds, were introduced in different provinces at different times. Using detailed...

We present new evidence of the correlation of height with important socioeconomic outcomes, finding the height profile is significantly non linear at mean height, especially for males. We trace this non linearity back to the adult height profiles of cognitive scores from the teenage and...

We investigate whether child tax benefits reduce child poverty and labor force participation among single mothers within the context of the 2015 expansion of the Canadian Universal Child Care Benefit (UCCB) and the 2016 introduction of the Canada Child Benefit (CCB). We compare single mothers to...

Starting in the 2016/17 academic year, high school students in Norway who missed more than 10 percent of the hours in a given course without a medical excuse could not receive a final grade. We examine the impacts of this policy on student absenteeism, the incidence of the no grade penalty and...

We study the effects of the unionization of faculty at Canadian universities from 1970-2022 using an event-study design. Using administrative data which covers the full universe of faculty salaries, we find strong evidence that unionization leads to both average salary gains and compression of...

While many jurisdictions ban teacher strikes on the assumption that they harm students, there is surprisingly little research on this question. The majority of existing studies make cross section comparisons of students who do or do not experience a strike, and report that strikes do not affect...

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...

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...

We explore the fiscal implications of reforms to the Canadian retirement income system by decomposing the fiscal effect of reforms into two components. The mechanical effect captures the change in the government's budget assuming no behavioral response to the reform. The second component is the...