Casey Warman

Ethnic Enclaves and Immigrant Earnings Growth

The impact of living in an ethnic enclave on earnings growth of immigrants in Canada is examined using the 1981-2001 Censuses. Consistent with U.S. findings, enclaves are found to have a negative impact on the earnings growth of male immigrants. A negative impact is also found for female immigrants. Living in an enclave was found to be particularly harmful for individuals immigrating as adults, especially for females, but did not affect immigrants who arrived at a young age. Enclaves had a more negative impact on high-skilled male immigrants, especially if they had received the bulk of their education outside Canada. Enclaves were also found to hinder language skills.

The evolution of male-female earnings differentials in Canadian universities,1970–2001

In this paper, we use a unique data set containing detailed information on all full-time teachers at Canadian universities over the period 1970 through 2001. The individual level data are collected by Statistics Canada from all universities in Canada and are used to analyze the evolution of male-female wage differentials of professors in Canadian universities. The long time series aspect of this data source along with the detailed administrative information allow us to provide a more complete and more accurate portrait of the wage gap than is available in most other studies. The results of a cohort-based analysis indicate that the male salary advantage among university faculty has declined for more recent birth cohorts. This has been driven not so much by an increase in the real salaries of female professors but from a cross cohort decline in the earnings of male professors and the fact that female professors have not experienced a similar cross cohort decline. Also important to note is the fact that the differences across cohorts appear to be permanent. There is no clear pattern of changes in these cohort differences with age.

The Mechanisms of Alcohol Control.

A substantial economics literature documents that tighter alcohol controls reduce alcohol-related harms but far less is known about mechanisms. We use the universe of Canadian mortality records to document that Canada’s Minimum Legal Drinking Age (MLDA) significantly reduces mortality rates of young men but has much smaller effects on women. Using drinking data that are far more detailed than in prior work, we document that the MLDA substantially reduces “extreme” drinking among men but not women. Our results suggest that alcohol control efforts targeting young adults should focus on reducing extreme drinking behavior.

Technological Change, Occupational Tasks and Declining Immigrant Outcomes: Implications for Earnings and Income Inequality in Canada

The earnings and occupational task requirements of immigrants to Canada are analyzed. The growing education levels of immigrants in the 1990s have not led to a large improvement in earnings as one might expect if growing computerization and the resulting technological change was leading to a rising return to non-routine cognitive skills and a greater wage return to university education. Controlling for education, we find a pronounced cross-arrival cohort decline in earnings that coincided with cross-cohort declines in cognitive occupational task requirements and cross-cohort increases in manual occupational task requirements. The immigrant earnings outcomes had only a small effect on overall Canadian earnings inequality.

Literacy, Numeracy, Technology Skill and Labour Market Outcomes among Indigenous Peoples in Canada

We use the 2012 Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies to examine proficiency in information-processing skills, educational attainment and labour market outcomes among Indigenous peoples in Canada. Similar to previous literature, we find negative earnings differentials, lower employment rates and higher unemployment for Indigenous populations and important differences between First Nations, Métis and Inuit people. First Nations people do much worse in terms of earnings and employment outcomes, while we find evidence that Métis people have worse employment outcomes and negative earnings differentials in the upper part of the distribution. We also find sizable literacy, numeracy and technology skill gaps. Not surprisingly, there is a positive relationship between these information-processing skills and wages. However, the returns to skills are very similar for Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples, that is, we find no evidence of economic discrimination. Once these skills are conditioned on, the earnings differentials greatly decline. We also find that education can reduce skill and wage gaps, although the additional impact is small. The results suggest a greater need to consider barriers to education faced by Indigenous peoples.

The Effect of Prices on Youth Cigarette and E-Cigarette Use: Economic Substitutes or Complements?

We explore the effect of e-cigarette prices and an e-cigarette tax increase in Minnesota on youth use of e-cigarettes and cigarettes. Our price variation comes from 35,000 retailers participating in the Nielsen retail data system. We match this price and tax variation to survey data on current use of e-cigarettes and cigarettes for over 80,000 11-17 year olds from the National Youth Tobacco Survey (NYTS) for years 2011 to 2015. We find evidence that higher e-cigarette taxes and refill prices reduce youth e-cigarette use. Disposable e-cigarette prices reduce e-cigarette use for older teens. Cross-price/tax effects also support substitution between these two products. Our results suggest that taxing e-cigarettes may have an unintended consequence of increasing youth smoking intensity and that youth may continue obtaining nicotine following cigarette tax increases by using e-cigarettes.