We examine the impact of maternity leaves on the period mothers are away from work postbirth and the likelihood they return to their prebirth employer. We use the introduction and expansion of statutory job-protected maternity leave entitlements in Canada to identify these effects. We find that...

Using an extraordinary database drawn from longitudinal income tax records, we decompose Canada's growth in earnings inequality into its persistent and transitory components. We find that the growth in earnings inequality reflects both an increase in long-run inequality and an increase in...

The growing labor force participation of women with small children in both the U.S. and Canada has led to calls for increased public financing for childcare. The optimality of public financing depends on a host of factors, such as the %u201Ccrowd-out%u201D of existing childcare arrangements, the...

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 construct a new time series on the Canadian female/male pay ratio. The new series is based on wage data rather than the earnings data that has been used in the past. Wages more closely correspond to the price of labour, which is the focus of most theories of labour market discrimination and...

In this paper we extend the historical record of French-English differences in labour market compensation for Quebec by providing evidence on early 19th century Montreal. Our focus is on the market for apprenticeships. We make use of the detail in apprentice contracts signed between individual...

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...

La correlation entre le taux de feminite des professions et les salaires constitue le fondement de la legislation en matiere d'equite salariale et de valeur comparable. Diverses etudes anterieures ont analyse cette correlation a partir de donnees americaines et ont cerne certains des facteurs...

Nous presentons un cadre d'analyse dynamique du chomage et l'appliquons a des donnees canadiennes et americaines. L'analyse est axee sur la distinction entre lefait d'etre au chomage et le fait de commencer une periode de chomage, c'est-a-dire entre l'effectif des chomeurs et l'afflux de...

A framework for the dynamic analysis of unemployment is presented, and applied to Canadian and U.S. data. The focus of the analysis is upon the distinctionbetween being unemployed and becoming unemployed, that is, between the stock and the flow of unemployment. The share of a particular group in...