The authors examine the effects of minimum wage legislation in Canada over the period 1975-93. For teenagers we find that a 10 percent increase in the minimum wage is associated with roughly a 2.5 percent decrease in employment. They also find that this result is driven by low frequency...

In this paper we document the economic outcomes of elderly immigrants to Canada. Our objective is to describe the extent to which elderly immigrants may have low income (are “in povertyâ€) and their interactions with the Canadian income transfer system. The study has two main parts....

The authors examine the male/female earnings differential between 1970 and 1990. Their objective is to provide consistent estimates that can be compared and interpreted over time, and to assess the sensitivity of their results to alternative specifications. The authors find that women made...

We examine the (sequential) introduction of early retirement provisions to Canada's two public pension plans. These reforms provide a unique opportunity to assess the effect of public pension plan parameters on labor supply behavior, free of the biases that potentially affect the simple...

In this article, the authors examine the economic assimilation of immigrants to Canada. They provide new evidence on immigrants who arrived in the 1970s and document an increase in the dispersion of labor market outcomes across immigrants of different vintages over time. The authors' results...

Using the native born as a benchmark, we examine immigrants' reliance on Canada's social safety net. Both in the raw data, and after conditioning on a variety of explanatory variables, we find that immigrants have lower participation rates in Unemployment Insurance and Social Assistance than...

The authors evaluate some explanations of immigrants' family labor-supply behavior. Upon arrival, immigrant husbands work less than natives but immigrant wives work more. A conventional labor-supply model uses wage assimilation to explain these differences but is not supported by the data. More...