We examine the impact of high school graduation on the probability individuals from welfare backgrounds use welfare themselves. Our data consists of administrative educational records for grade 12 students in a Canadian province linked with their own and their parents' welfare records. We...

Understanding the causal impacts of taking atrisk youth into government care is part of the evidence base for policy. Two sources of exogenous variation affecting alternative subsets of the atrisk population provide causal impacts interpreted as local average treatment effects. Placing 16...

This study compares administrative and survey data on BC welfare (social assistance) recipients, to test whether survey data is sufficiently accurate for use in policy-oriented research. BC welfare and education data is compared to the 1994 Public Use Microdata (BC sample) of Statistics Canada's...

Understanding the causal impacts of taking youth on the margins of risk into foster care is an element of the evidence-base on which policy development for this crucial function of government relies. Yet, there is little research looking at these causal impacts; neither is there much empirical...

Full day kindergarten (FDK) is expanding across North America, but program impacts remain poorly understood. Using administrative data, this paper reports impacts from a targeted program in British Columbia for Aboriginal and English as a Second Language (ESL) students. Staged implementation of...