Ana M. Ferrer

Education, Credentials, and Immigrant Earnings

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The Effect of Literacy on Immigrant Earnings

We examine the impact of literacy on immigrant earnings and the sources of lower returns to education and experience among immigrants. We find that the native-born literacy distribution dominates that for immigrants. However, the two groups obtain similar returns to literacy skills, contrary to discrimination-based explanations for immigrant—native-born earnings differentials. Among the university-educated, literacy differences account for about two-thirds of the earnings gap. However, low returns to foreign experience have a larger impact on this differential. Among the less educated, literacy differences and differences in the returns to experience have similar effects on the earnings differential.

Should Workers Care about Firm Size

The authors analyze how firms of different sizes reward measured skills and unmeasured ability. The empirical methodology, based on nonlinear instrumental variable estimation, permits direct estimation of the returns to unmeasured ability by firm size. An analysis of panel data from the Canadian Survey of Labour and Income Dynamics for two periods, 1993–1998 and 1996–2001, reveals statistically significant differences between firms of different sizes. In particular, returns to unmeasured ability are higher in medium-sized firms than in either small firms or large firms. The authors find that the firm-size wage gap and the differential in returns to unmeasured ability between small and medium-sized firms is mainly explained by ability sorting. The fact that larger firms reward ability less than medium-sized firms is consistent with an explanation based on monitoring costs. When firms become “too large,” monitoring costs may prevent them from rewarding ability directly through wages.

Long-Term Consequences of Natural Resource Booms for Human Capital Accumulation

Tight labor markets driven by resource booms could increase the opportunity cost of schooling and crowd out human capital formation. For oil-producing economies such as the Province of Alberta, the OPEC oil shocks during the period from 1973 to 1981 may have had an adverse long-term effect on the productivity of the labor force if the oil boom resulted in workers reducing their ultimate investment in human capital rather than merely altering the timing of schooling. The authors analyze the effect of this decade-long oil boom on the long-term human capital investments and productivity for Alberta birth cohorts that were of normal schooling ages before, during, and after the oil boom. Their findings suggest that resource booms may change the timing of schooling but they do not reduce the total accumulation of human capital.

New Directions in Immigration Policy: Canada's Evolving Approach to the Selection of Economic Immigrants

Canadas immigration system is currently undergoing significant change driven by several goals that include (1) a desire to improve the economic outcomes of entering immigrants; (2) an attempt to better respond to short-term regional labor market shortages often associated with commodity booms, and (3) a desire to shift immigration away from the three largest cities to other regions of the country. These goals reflect the implementation of new immigration programs in the 2000s. The paper discusses the recent changes to Canadian immigration policy, examines preliminary evaluations of the new programs and discusses potential future issues emanating from the changes.

Factors influencing the fertility choices of child immigrants in Canada

We analysed the fertility of women who migrated to Canada before reaching age 19, using the 20 per cent sample of the Canadian censuses from 1991 to 2006. Fertility increases with age at immigration, and is particularly high for those immigrating in late adolescence. This pattern prevails regardless of the country of origin, and of whether the mother tongue of the migrants was an official language in Canada. The fertility of those for whom it was an official language is always lower on average than of those for whom it was not, but there does not seem to be a critical age at which the fertility of the former and the latter starts to diverge. Formal education has an effect: the fertility of immigrants who arrived in Canada at any age before adulthood and who were or became college graduates is similar to that of their native peers. An appendix to this paper is available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00324728.2013.802007

Immigrants and Demography: Marriage, Divorce, and Fertility

This is a draft chapter for B. R. Chiswick and P. W. Miller (eds.) Handbook on the Economics of International Migration. It discusses some of the data and methodological challenges to estimating trends in family formation and union dissolution as well as fertility among immigrants, and examines the evidence collected from the main studies in the area. The literature on immigrant family formation is diverse but perhaps the key findings highlighted in this chapter are that outcomes depend greatly on the age at migration and on the cultural norms immigrants bring with them and their distance to those of the host country. With regard to marriage we focus on the determinants of intermarriage, the stability of these unions, and the timing of union formation. The last section of the chapter reviews, among other things, a set of mechanisms that may explain the fertility behavior of first generation immigrants; namely, selection, disruption and adaptation. The section ends with a focus on the second generation.

Fertility Patterns of Child Migrants Age at Migration and Ancestry in Comparative Perspective

This article examines the fertility of women who migrated as children to one of three OECD countries—Canada, the United Kingdom, and France—and how it differs from that of native-born women, by age at migration. By looking at child migrants whose fertility behavior is neither interrupted by the migration event nor confounded by selection, the authors obtain a unique perspective on the adaptation process as a mechanism that explains variation in observed foreign and native-born fertility differentials. The authors find patterns that are broadly consistent with the adaptation hypothesis—which posits that as migrants become accustomed to their host countries, their fertility norms begin to resemble those of the native population—and, on average, limited cross-national variation in fertility differentials. The effect of exposure to the host country, however, seems to vary by country of origin, a finding that underscores the importance of taking into account the heterogeneity of the foreign-born population.

Evidence of the Association between Household Food Insecurity and Heating Cost Inflation in Canada, 1998–2001

Dans cet article, nous analysons différents aspects de l’augmentation de 5,3 points de pourcentage de la prévalence de l’insécurité alimentaire que l’on observe entre 1998–1999 (données de l’Enquête nationale sur la santé de la population) et 2000–2001 (données de l’Enquête sur la santé dans les collectivités canadiennes) au Canada. Nous montrons que cette augmentation touche de façon disproportionnée les provinces de l’Ouest, et en particulier l’Alberta, ainsi que les propriétaires plus que les locataires. Nous calculons également que les différences que l’on observe entre les provinces en ce qui a trait à l’augmentation des frais de chauffage expliquent jusqu’à 61 % des variations de l’augmentation de l’insécurité alimentaire observées entre ces mêmes provinces entre 1988 et 2001.

Economic Outcomes of Adult Education and Training

In this article, we examine the literature on adult education and training focusing on the acquisition of skills that are job related, but where learning is a separate activity from regular job activities. We provide an overview of the methods commonly used to evaluate the outcomes of adult education and training, mainly the effect on earnings and employment, and a summary of the results of this literature. We distinguish between government-sponsored and private-sector training as they usually differ in the goal of the training, the type of subject taking training, and the skills they acquire when training.