Mikal Skuterud

The visible minority earnings gap across generations of Canadians

To what extent the earnings gaps facing Canadas visible minorities reflect discrimination is a question of tremendous policy interest. This paper argues that failing to account for the limited Canadian ancestry of visible minorities overestimates discrimination if immigrant assimilation is an intergenerational process. Using the 2001 and 2006 Canadian Censuses, weekly earnings, conditional on a rich set of worker and job characteristics, are compared with child immigrant, second-, and third-and-higher-generation Canadian men. The results reveal a tendency for earnings to increase across subsequent generations of visible minority, but not white, men. Though the pattern is strongest between the first and second generation, for black men it is also evident between the Canadian born with and without a Canadian-born parent. Despite this progress, for most visible minority groups earnings gaps are identified even among third-and-higher-generation Canadians.

Identifying the Potential of Work-Sharing as a Job-Creation Strategy

Between 1997 and 2000, the Canadian province of Quebec reduced its standard workweek from 44 to 40 hours with the aim of stimulating employment growth. Unlike the European work‐sharing policies examined elsewhere, the Quebec policy contained no suggestion or requirement that employers provide wage increases to compensate workers for lost hours. For this reason, among others, the Quebec policy provides a better test of the potential of work‐sharing as a job‐creation strategy. The evidence suggests that, despite a 20% reduction among full‐time workers in weekly hours worked beyond 40, the policy failed to raise employment at either the provincial level or within industries where hours of work were affected relatively more.

Immigrants and the Dynamics of High-Wage Jobs

The authors exploit immigrant identifiers in the Canadian Labour Force Survey (LFS) and the longitudinal dimension of these data to compare the labor force and job dynamics of immigrants and native-born workers. They examine the role of job, as opposed to worker, heterogeneity in driving immigrant wage disparities and investigate how the paths into and out of jobs of varying quality compare between immigrant and native-born workers. They find that the disparity in immigrant job quality, which does not appear to diminish with years since arrival, reflects a combination of relatively low transitions into high-wage jobs and high transitions out of these jobs. The former result appears to be due equally to difficulties obtaining high-wage jobs directly out of unemployment and to using low-wage jobs as stepping-stones. The authors find little or no evidence, however, that immigrant job seekers face barriers to low-wage jobs.

The Effect of Labor Relations Laws on Unionization Rates within the Labor Force: Evidence from the Canadian Provinces

We examine the potential of labor‐relations reforms to address wage inequality by relating an index of the favorableness to unions of Canadian provincial labor‐relations laws to changes in industry, occupation, education, and gender‐specific provincial unionization rates. While we find some evidence of larger unionization gains among high‐school–educated workers, the differences across groups are small and in some cases suggest larger gains among professionals. Overall, the results suggest a limited potential for reforms in labor‐relations laws to mitigate growing labor‐market inequality.