Jane Friesen

Disabled Peers and Academic Achievement

We use data on students in grades 47 in the Canadian province of British Columbia to investigate the effect of having disabled peers on value-added exam outcomes. Longitudinal data for multiple cohorts of students are used together with school-by-grade-level fixed effects to account for endogenous selection into schools. Our estimates suggest that same-grade peers with learning and behavioral disabilities have an adverse effect on the test score gains of nondisabled students in British Columbia. However, these effects are statistically insignificant and are sufficiently small that they are unlikely to raise concerns about the placement of this group of disabled students. The effect of peers with other disabilities is also small and statistically insignificant but varies in sign.

Sorting, peers, and achievement of Aboriginal students in British Columbia

We examine the contribution of differences in school environments to the gap in education outcomes between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal students. We find both substantial school-level segregation of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal students and a substantial gap in test scores. Conventional achievement gap decompositions attribute roughly half of the grade 7 test score gap to between-school differences and half to within-school differences. The segregation of Aboriginal students suggests that peer effects might explain some of these between-school achievement differences. However, we find that peer effects associated with a greater proportion of Aboriginal peers, if anything, improve value-added exam outcomes of Aboriginal students.

Overtime pay regulation and weekly hours of work in Canada

Abstract The idea that overtime pay regulation can be used to create employment continues to receive attention in a variety of countries. Standard hours, beyond which a statutory overtime premium must be paid, varies across Canadian provinces, as do coverage rules. Exploiting this variation produces a smaller estimated response of weekly hours to standard hours than previous researchers have found in other countries. Combined with evidence of substantially more moonlighting and higher wages in jurisdictions with lower standard hours, these results support a somewhat pessimistic view of the idea that reducing standard hours can be used promote work-sharing in Canada.

Expanding School Choice Through Open Enrolment: Lessons from British Columbia

Is expanding the scope for parents to choose among competing schools an effective policy lever for improving the quality of education? What lessons can we take from British Columbia’s experience with greater school choice? In 2002, British Columbia implemented a new policy that makes it easier for parents to opt out of their neighbourhood school. Along with the province’s rich administrative and test score data, the introduction of this “open enrolment” policy provides a rare opportunity to estimate the extent to which increased public school choice affects student achievement, concentrates minority students in enclave schools and promotes cream-skimming. Our results support several conclusions about British Columbia’s experience with open enrolment. First, the fact that many more parents succeeded in enrolling their children in out-of-catchment schools demonstrates that the policy had a meaningful impact on the public school choice opportunities available to many families. Second, the evidence suggests that open enrolment contributed to the development of important academic skills, but the magnitude of this impact depended on the geographic concentration of public schools. In the Lower Mainland, 10 to 15 percent of neighbourhoods are dense enough to have generated fairly substantial improvements in academic achievement. The gains in these neighbourhoods were equivalent to reducing class size by between two and three students; compared to class-size reductions, open enrolment is likely to be a fairly cost effective strategy for improving student achievement as measured by test scores. In the remaining neighbourhoods, where school density is lower, the impact of open enrolment on test scores was quite small. Finally, open enrolment did little to either segregate or integrate Lower Mainland students according to their cultural and ethnic backgrounds. There is also little evidence that popular schools engaged in creamskimming high-achieving students. These generally positive results might encourage policymakers in other jurisdictions to give fresh thought to introducing greater school choice into their public education systems.

How Student Disability Classifications and Learning Outcomes Respond to Special Education Funding Rules: Evidence from British Columbia

En 2002, la Colombie-Britannique a cessé de donner aux districts scolaires des subventions liées à l’éducation des enfants ayant des besoins spéciaux. Dans cette étude, nous évaluons les impacts de ce changement sur le nombre d’enfants ayant des besoins spéciaux et sur leurs résultats scolaires. Des données sur les élèves recueillies au moyen d’un panel montrent ainsi que, après l’arrêt des subventions, moins d’élèves étaient susceptibles d’être désignés comme étant doués, ayant un trouble comportemental moyen ou ayant une déficience mentale légère. Notre analyse des résultats des élèves de 7e année aux tests standardisés indique également que, parmi les élèves qui avaient fréquenté l’école pendant la plus longue période après l’arrêt des subventions, les résultats en lecture des enfants doués avaient baissé de façon substantielle.

The effect of unemployment insurance on weekly hours of work in Canada

Major revisions to the Canadian unemployment insurance program in 1997 created a benefit structure that effectively provides more insurance to workers who are employed for longer workweeks. This anomaly creates an incentive for workers and firms to tailor their weekly work schedules to maximize net program benefits. Analysis of Labour Force Survey data shows that workers and firms responded to these changes by altering weekly hours as expected. This behavioural response demonstrates the sensitivity of hours of work decisions to labour market policies.

Dynamic factor demand equations in U.S. and Canadian agriculture

This research provides one of the first empirical estimates of a data-based dynamic factor demand model for American and Canadian agriculture. Models such as these deserve more widespread use in the empirical analysis of agriculture. These models have the advantage that they do not impose inappropriate dynamics on the data. Rather they permit the data to select the appropriate dynamics. We use a model originally developed by Anderson and Blundell. This model is a general first-order dynamic model which contains as testable hypothesis several simpler models. This model permits us to estimate the long-run agricultural production structure as a subset of the dynamic parameter estimates. We will test this long-run structure for symmetry, homotheticity and neutral technical change. The estimated models may be used to test for three alternative dynamic structures. In the limit, dynamics may not be needed and we can test for the static long-run equilibrium model. Two intermediate cases are the autoregressive and the partial adjustment models which are simpler than the general model but still include dynamics. Our results suggest that the long-run equilibrium model is unsatisfactory in both countries. A dynamic model is needed. In both countries, the two more restricted dynamic models are rejected. The general dynamic model is required. In Canada, the long-run equilibrium structure is homothetic with neutral technical change. In the United States, homotheticity is also accepted but neutral technical change is rejected.

Expanding Economic Costing in Health Care: Values, Gender and Diversity

In this paper we offer a normative analysis of economic evaluations by critically examining Canadian social values in relation to health, and contrasting these with the inherent values, methodological assumptions and pragmatic policy consequences of conventional cost of illness (COI) models. Through this analysis we reveal the value biases and resulting limitations of existing COI approaches, and propose an expanded framework for estimating costs that takes into account gender and diversity. This proposed framework builds upon fundamental shifts in values discourse emerging in the fields of economics, ethics, social policy, and feminist theory. Specifically, we demonstrate the implications of these cross-disciplinary convergences for COI studies. The analysis and framework provide arguments for why and how traditional costing methodologies need to be transformed to realize their full potential for informing health policy decisions. The paper reflects the work of a multidisciplinary group of researchers from the fields of economics, political science, sociology, and nursing.

Open Enrolment and Student Achievement

We investigate the effects of public school open enrolment, which allows students to enroll in any public school with available space, on fourth grade test scores. We find a small, positive effect on the average student; this benefit appears to stem from increased competition among schools, rather than directly through expanded choice opportunities. Among students whose catchment school is locally top-ranked according to test scores, greater choice is of no direct benefit; however, students whose catchment school is locally lowest-ranked earn higher scores when they have access to better local schools. Students in both groups benefit from increased school competition.

Testing Short-Run Factor Demand Models in Canadian and U.S. Agriculture

Equilibrium factor demand models are being replaced by a variety of short-run and dynamic models in empirical production research. In this paper, the authors provide evidence on the usefulness of short-run production models in aggregate Canadian and American agriculture from 1961 to 1982. They offer an alternative data-based dynamic model which encompasses the short-run model. This permits them to test for the short-run models and for two simple dynamic models in favor of their most general dynamic model.