This paper has three objectives. The first is to discuss the major issues involved in defining and measuring child poverty. The choices that must be made are clarified, and a set of six principles to serve as a guide for public policy are stated. The second objective is to take stock of child...

Our objective is to obtain an accurate estimate of the degree of intergenerational income mobility in Canada. We use income tax information on about 400,000 father-son pairs, and find intergenerational earnings elasticities to be about 0.2. Earnings mobility tends to be slightly greater than...

Two quasi-experiments are used to estimate the impact of parental divorce on the adult incomes and labour market behaviour of adolescents, as well as on their use of social programs, and their marital/fertility behaviour. These involve the use of individuals experiencing the death of a parent,...

In this paper we use administrative data associated with the tax system to: (1) document the extent of intergenerational income mobility among Canadian men; and (2) estimate the income disadvantage (in adulthood) of being raised in a low income household. We find that there is considerable...

The objective of this paper is to introduce a new measure of the average duration of unemployment spells using Canadian data. The paper summarizes the work of Corak (1993) and Corak and Heisz (1994) on the average complete duration of unemployment in a non-technical way by focusing on the...

This paper examines the robustness of a measure of the average complete duration of unemployment in Canada to a host of assumptions used in its derivation. In contrast to the average incomplete duration of unemployment, which is a lagging cyclical indicator, this statistic is a coincident...

Income inequality is on the rise, and everyone, from President Obama and Pope Francis to Prince Charles and Standard & Poor's, is talking about it. But these conversations about what are arguably the most significant changes in the distribution of incomes and earnings since the 1940s are leading...

This study of the emergence of inequality during the early years is based upon a comparative analysis of children at the age of about five years in Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States. We study a series of child outcomes related to readiness to learn, focusing on...

This paper adopts the technique of DiNardo, Fortin and Lemieux (1996) to decompose differences in the distribution of PISA test scores in Canada, and assesses the relative contribution of differences in the distribution of ﾓclass sizeﾔ and time-in-term, other school factors and student...