J - Labor and Demographic Economics
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The Political Impact of Immigration: Evidence from the United States
In this paper we study the impact of immigration to the United States on the vote for the Republican Party by analyzing county-level data on election outcomes between 1990 and 2010. Our main contribution is to separate the effect of high-skilled and low-skilled immigrants, by exploiting the different geography and timing of the inflows of these two groups of immigrants. -
Wages: Measurement and Key Drivers
Available sources of hourly wage data in Canada sometimes send conflicting signals about wage growth. This note thus has two objectives: first, we develop a wage measure—the wage-common—to better capture the (underlying) wage pressures reflecting the common trend across the available data sources. Second, we re-examine the relationship between wage growth and macro drivers (labour market slack and labour productivity). -
The Impacts of Minimum Wage Increases on the Canadian Economy
This note reviews the channels through which scheduled minimum wage increases over the coming years may affect Canadian economic activity and inflation and assesses their macroeconomic impacts. From reduced-form estimates of direct minimum wage pass-through, we find that consumer price index (CPI) inflation could be boosted by about 0.1 percentage point (pp) on average in 2018. -
Wage Dynamics and Returns to Unobserved Skill
Economists disagree about the factors driving the substantial increase in residual wage inequality in the U.S. over the past few decades. We identify and estimate a general model of log wage residuals that incorporates: (i) changing returns to unobserved skills, (ii) a changing distribution of unobserved skills, and (iii) changing volatility in wages due to factors unrelated to skills. -
The Causal Impact of Migration on US Trade: Evidence from Political Refugees
Immigrants can increase international trade by shifting preferences towards the goods of their country of origin and by reducing bilateral transaction costs. Using geographical variation across U.S. states for the period 2008 to 2013, I estimate the respective causal impact of immigrants on U.S. exports and imports. -
Labour Force Participation: A Comparison of the United States and Canada
This note explores the drivers behind the recent increase in the US participation rate in the labour market and assesses the likelihood of a similar gain in Canada. The growth in the US participation rate has largely been due to a pickup in the participation of prime-age workers following a post-recession decline. -
Wage Growth in Canada and the United States: Factors Behind Recent Weakness
This note examines the relatively subdued pace of wage growth in Canada since the commodity price decline in 2014 and assesses whether the weakness is attributable to cyclical (e.g., labour market slack) or structural factors (e.g., resource reallocation and demographic change). -
Downward Nominal Wage Rigidity, Inflation and Unemployment: New Evidence Using Micro‐Level Data
Recent evidence suggests that the extent of downward nominal wage rigidity (DNWR) in the Canadian labour market has risen following the 2008–09 recession (see Brouillette, Kostyshyna and Kyui 2016). -
Constrained Efficiency with Adverse Selection and Directed Search
Constrained efficient allocation (CE) is characterized in a model of adverse selection and directed search (Guerrieri, Shimer, and Wright (2010)). CE is defined to be the allocation that maximizes welfare, the ex-ante utility of all agents, subject to the frictions of the environment. -
A Canada-US Comparison of Labour Market Conditions
In this note, we provide a brief comparison of the recent developments in the labour markets in Canada and the United States. Our analysis indicates that slack remains in the Canadian labour market, while the US labour market is close to full employment.