At a time of rising cost of living, wide wage inequalities and widespread in-work poverty, the demand for a living wage has heightened. This Policy Insights introduces and contextualises the concept of a living wage. It also highlights the key measurement assumptions and criteria that underlie...

Selon de nombreuses recherches, il semble que les immigrants plus qualifiés, en particulier dans les domaines des sciences, de la technologie, de l’ingénierie et des mathématiques, sont non seulement plus innovateurs que leurs collègues nés au pays qui les a reçus, mais qu’ils ont...

We compare literacy test scores and relative wage and employment outcomes of Australian, Canadian and U.S. immigrants using the 2003/2006 Adult Literacy and Life Skills Survey (ALLS). We find substantially higher immigrant skill levels at the lower end of the distribution in Australia,...

A growing body of research suggests that skilled immigrants, particularly those in the “STEM†fields (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics), are not only more innovative than their native-born counterparts but also have the potential to produce positive productivity...

Research comparing the labour market performance of recent cohorts of immigrants to Australia and Canada points to superior employment and earnings outcomes in Australia. Examining Australian and Canadian Census data between 1986 and 2006, we find that this performance advantage is not driven by...

This paper proposes a new framework to empirically assess the effects of the minimum wage in a developing country. This approach allows us to jointly estimate the effects of the minimum wage on unemployment, average wages, sector mobility, wage inequality, the size of the informal sector and on...

This paper uses the Canadian Labour Force Survey to understand why the level and dispersion of wages have evolved differently across provinces from 1997 to 2013. The starker interprovincial differences are the much faster increase in the level of wages and decline in wage dispersion in...

While proponents argue that minimum wage laws are essential in improving social welfare and economic well-being, implementation of minimum wage laws can also be associated with increased unemployment and the movement of workers into the informal sector where worker protection and workplace...

Ever since the seminal work of Stigler (1962), economists have recognized that information in markets is costly to acquire and can lead to “search frictionsâ€. The remarkable growth in online search has substantially lowered the cost of information acquisition. Despite this, there is...

Canadian apprenticeship policy has recently turned to direct subsidies for participants, including a federal tax incentive for employers. Some assumptions underlying the employer subsidy are: that apprenticeship training is a principal contributor to the skilled trades labour supply; that...