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Transferring income to families with children has long been a basic Canadian social policy. Though motivated by a range of goals, a central expectation has been that higher family income will lead to better child outcomes, especially in low-income families. This paper presents a synthesis of Canadian research estimating the effect of household income on measures of child development and well-being. While child outcomes and socioeconomic status (SES) are highly correlated, the effect of income on child outcomes, controlling for other SES factors, is found to be statistically significant but of much smaller magnitude than correlation alone indicates. The paper also discusses key theoretical and methodological issues in this area of research, identifies areas for future research, and draws implications for public policy design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the implication of the decision to give 2006 Census respondents the option of letting Statistics Canada access their income tax files rather than answering income-related questions directly. We find that giving respondents the option to share their income tax files (or not) adds a confounding factor when it comes to measuring family-income inequality, particularly for the bottom tail of the distribution. The consent decision does not, however, materially affect the estimation of standard wage equations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Canadian Public Policy is the property of University of Toronto Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article presents information on the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS) data in analysing the levels and trends of income inequality in five countries. Inequality increased in Sweden, Great Britain and the United States but did not increase in Canada and the Netherlands. Increased inequality of household head's earnings and increased shares of spouse's earnings in family income account for much of the observed increases in income inequality. The public sector can, in general, be assigned a moderating effect on these changes. Demographic shifts are not assigned any major role in inequality changes. The two distinctive features of this paper are that it examines the trends in inequality in disposable income among the whole population in the five countries using comparable data, and it examines which broad sets of explanations are and which are not compatible with the observations, using a unified framework.

The Occupy movement catalyzed public debate on the issue of growing income inequality. This paper examines recent patterns of inequality in Canada, paying particular attention to changes in the characteristics of the top 1% of income earners. At the national level, the gap between the top percentile and the other 99% has widened considerably: in 2006, 11% of the nation's income was concentrated in the hands of top earners (whose mean income of $344,000 is 11 times that of the average Canadian) compared with 7.7% just 15 years earlier. Beneath such national-level figures lie important geographical differences in the income hierarchy: the thresholds, average incomes and socio-economic characteristics of the top 1% vary widely across provinces and cities. Among the most important spatial shifts observed is the growing concentration of high-income groups in energy-rich Western Canada, where Calgary has become the most unequal city in the country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper compares recent developments in income inequality in Canada, Germany, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States. In addition to describing cross-national variation in changes in income inequality, the paper examines different explanatory factors for these recent developments. The findings reported indicate that there is substantial cross-national variation, not only with regard to the level of inequality, but furthermore with regard to changes in inequality. The results indicate that the equalizing effect of welfare state redistribution did not decrease in all countries. By contrast, in all countries there was a universal tendency towards increased inequality in the pre-tax and transfer distribution, although the magnitude of the change differs from country to country. Even though a polarization of the earnings distribution is reported, the results still give no support to cross-national convergence with regard to income inequality during the 1980s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The principal purpose of this paper is to criticize the Eberts-Steece approach and to derive a necessary and sufficient condition for causality directly from the estimated VARMA model without transformation (direct VARMA approach). In addition, a practical procedure is suggested for tests of causality. Consequently, we are concerned with constructing causally and structurally an adequate simultaneous equations system (i.e. a causal VARMA model) and determining causal relations between multiple time series by our practical procedure.
The remainder of this paper is constructed as follows. Section II compares the parametric conditions of the two approaches of causality tests and criticizes the Eberts-Steece approach. Section III redefines the parametric conditions employed by the direct VARMA approach and provides the practical procedure for a causal VARMA model analysis. Section IV reports the empirical results from the application of our practical procedure to Canadian money and income data. Section V gives the conclusions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction With increasing interest in income-related differences in cancer outcomes, accurate measurement of income is imperative. Misclassification of income can result in wrong conclusions as to the presence of income inequalities. We determined misclassification between individual- and neighborhood-level income and their association with overall survival among colorectal cancer (CRC) patients. Methods The Canadian Census Health and Environment Cohorts were used to identify CRC patients diagnosed from 1992 to 2017. We used neighborhood income quintiles from Statistics Canada and created individual income quintiles from the same data sources to be as similar as possible. Agreement between individual and neighborhood income quintiles was measured using cross-tabulations and weighted kappa statistics. Cox proportional hazards and Lin semiparametric hazards models were used to determine the effects of individual and neighborhood income independently and jointly on survival. Analyses were also stratified by rural residence. Results A total of 103 530 CRC patients were included in the cohort. There was poor agreement between individual and neighborhood income with only 17% of respondents assigned to the same quintile (weighted kappa = 0.18). Individual income had a greater effect on relative and additive survival than neighborhood income when modeled separately. The interaction between individual and neighborhood income demonstrated that the most at risk for poor survival were those in the lowest individual and neighborhood income quintiles. Misclassification was more likely to occur for patients residing in rural areas. Conclusion Cancer researchers should avoid using neighborhood income as a proxy for individual income, especially among patients with cancers with demonstrated inequalities by income. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Persons with disability (PWD) experience disproportionately high poverty rates in Canada. This trend is apparent especially among youth compared to those who develop disabilities later in life. PWD in poverty have additional needs that increase barriers to full participation in society and translate to higher basic costs for daily living. Despite the existence of income assistance programs in Canada to mitigate income inequalities faced by PWDs, access to these programs can be limited. Objective: To describe use of income assistance for young adults with disability in British Columbia for the development of potential approaches to improve realized access to these programs. Methods: We conducted a population-based retrospective cohort study using British Columbia linked administrative data. We described differences in income assistance use among PWD by the level of special education funding received during primary school education (from most to least; Level 1, Level 2, Level 3, Unfunded, and no special education) and family composition. We also provided longitudinal patterns of income assistance use. Results: Of 218,324 young adults, 88% received no special education, 0.1% used Level One, 1.6% used Level Two, 2.9% used Level Three, and 7.1% used Unfunded special education coding. Young adults with Level One special education funding had the highest rates of hospitalizations and continuing care, with no hospitalization due to homelessness. Those with Level Three special education coding had higher rates of hospitalization and hospitalization due to homelessness than Level Two young adults. When transitioning to adulthood initially, Level One and Two funded individuals used relatively more disability income assistance than individuals from the other funding levels. Nearly all BCEA users with higher funded special education codes used this disability-specific program, while lesser funded special education codes used the Temporary Assistance more frequently, for a longer duration and were more likely to be persistent Temporary Assistance users. Conclusions: Sustainable and reliable access to income assistance programs remains an issue across the heterogeneity of needs faced by young adults with disability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We explored socioeconomic gradients in self‐rated overall health (SROH) using indicators of materialist (educational attainment and perceived income adequacy) and psychosocial perspectives (subjective social status (SSS)) among adults living in countries with varying levels of income inequality, and the importance of psychosocial stress in mediating these associations. If psychosocial processes at the individual and societal levels correspond, associations between SSS and SROH should be higher among adults in countries with higher income inequality, and psychosocial stress should be a more important mediator of these associations. We used multigroup structural equation models to analyse cross‐sectional data from the International Food Policy Study of adults (n = 22,824) in Australia, Canada, Mexico, the UK and the United States. Associations between SSS and SROH were not higher in more unequal countries, nor was psychosocial stress a more important mediator of these associations. Inequities in SROH in more unequal countries may not predominantly reflect stress‐related pathways of social status differentiation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Self-reported life satisfaction is increasingly measured in government and private surveys around the world. In Canada, life satisfaction questions have not been asked in a consistent manner over time, but the accumulated set of data since 1985, along with recent surveys with repeated structure, now facilitates an analysis of regional changes. Those two and a half decades reveal a significant increase in life satisfaction in the province of Quebec as compared with the rest of Canada. The scale of this increase in well-being is comparable to the imputed effect of more than a trebling of mean household income. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article estimates a homogenous series of income shares and income composition for various upper-income groups within the top decile in the context of Canadian income tax statistics beginning in 1920. Personal income tax data was used to construct homogeneous series of top income shares in Canada over the course of the twentieth century. A number of important findings have emerged. First are the close parallels between the patterns and composition of top incomes in Canada and the U.S. Both countries experienced a sharp drop in top shares during World War II, with no recovery before the 1970s. During the last two decades, however, the top groups have largely recovered their prewar levels. Interestingly, this recent increase in income concentration has not been associated with increased mobility at the top of the income distribution in Canada.

This paper looks at changes in hourly wages and hours worked per week of prime-age males in different skill groups (measured by earnings quintile) in the United States and Canada from 1981 to 1997. The analysis reveals that increases in hourly wage inequality are primarily responsible for increases in weekly earnings inequality in both countries. Increases in the dispersion of hours worked per week play a more important part in explaining the increase in earnings inequality in Canada than in the United States. High-skill workers experienced increases in earnings growth due to increases in hours and, at least for the US, increases in wages. In contrast, low-skill workers experienced declines in earnings growth due to decreases in wages and hours. This evidence is consistent with a skill-biased demand shock. In Canada a larger percentage of the reduction in earnings of low-skill workers is accounted for by declining hours. This evidence suggests a higher degree of downward wage rigidity in Canada than in the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study carries out a decomposition of Theil-entropy measures into a between-group component, based on factors such as education, age, gender, and marital status, and a component representing inequality within each group. We apply a bootstrapping technique to measures of inequality to enable statistical inference. Trends in household income inequality in Canada are investigated using data from 1991 to 1997 drawn from he Survey of Consumer Finance. We find an evident trend toward increasing inequality of household incomes between the years 1991-1997, during which the economy was recovering from a steep recession. Although most of the increase in measured inequality is attributed to the 'within-group' component, we find the change in 'between-group' inequality to be significant for education, age, and marital status. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Market Basket Measure (MBM) has been increasingly positioned in Québec and Canada since 2009 as a metric to follow situations of poverty. This article shows that this measure, linked more specifically to the coverage of basic needs, can be used to design three indicators which acknowledge the whole range of income inequalities and the associated disparities in quality of life: (1) the distance from the MBM; (2) the number of baskets available to households; and (3) the components of after-tax income in relation to the MBM. These indicators can complement existing income inequality measures and inform public debates on socio-economic policy while leaving space for further research about the continuum between poverty and non-poverty. As they express and describe the distribution of after-tax income, a component of national economic accounts, among households along a vital guideline of basic needs coverage, they can contribute to a better understanding of quality of life and sustainability issues between the macro and micro levels of social organisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Canadian Studies in Population is the property of Springer Nature and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Studies changes in family income and consumption inequality in Canada, between 1978 and 1992. Cross-sectional distribution of consumption; Characteristics of the distribution of lifetime wealth.

This paper explores the sensitivity of the size distribution of family income in Canada to alternative definitions of income. These alternative definitions examine both wealth generally in the form of an annuity equivalent, and home ownership in the form of imputed rent. An adjustment for family size differences is also made. The impact of these adjustment is assessed for average incomes, inequality, and the incidence of low income for different age groups. The adjustments do have significant effects that vary by age; in particular, the economic position of the elderly seems understated by the usual data. Also, methodological considerations, such as the direct use of micro data and the choice of inequality indicator are shown to be significant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Societies exhibiting higher levels of economic inequality experience poorer health outcomes, and the proposed pathways used to explain these patterns are also relevant to oral health. This study therefore examines the relationship between the level of income inequality and the oral health and dental care services utilization of residents from eleven Canadian metropolitan areas. We calculated Pearson correlation coefficients (r) between each metropolitan area's Gini coefficient (used as a proxy for income inequality, calculated from 2006 Canadian census data) and each area's experience of dental pain, self-reported oral health, and use of dental care services (provided by data from the 2003 Canadian Community Health Survey). Greater levels of income inequality in the selected metropolitan areas were related to an increased likelihood of residents self-reporting their oral health as poor/fair and reporting a prolonged absence from visiting a dentist. There was, however, no relationship between the level of income inequality and the likelihood of respondents reporting a recent toothache, tooth sensitivity, or jaw pain. Policies designed to improve the oral health of the population, and Canadians' access to dental care generally, may therefore work best when supported by policies that promote greater economic equality within Canada. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using data from the Canadian National Population Health Survey (1994-2009), this study examines the relationship between comparison income and individual happiness. This study utilizes two definitions of comparison income: Average income of the reference group and the difference between one's own household income and the average income of the reference group. The estimations using the Ordered Probit Method suggest that an increase in the average income of the reference group reduces individual happiness. On the other hand, an individual's happiness increases when his/her own household income becomes larger in comparison to the average income of the reference group. To check the robustness of these results, this study re-estimated all models using a different composition of the reference group. However, the basic results still hold, thus confirming that comparison income has a significant negative impact on an individual's happiness level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Canadian Journal of Economics is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Canadian Journal of Economics is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Canadian Tax Journal / Revue Fiscale Canadienne is the property of Canadian Tax Foundation and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Using decomposable measures of inequality and applying bootstrapping methods in order to draw statistical inference, gender-based earnings inequality in conjunction with education and immigration status in Canada is investigated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]