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How does welfare affect the prosperity of mothers and their children? We study this question using a Canadian welfare reform and by linking administrative welfare records to tax returns, nearly all medical spending, and children's educational attainment. Eighty percent of mothers in the complier group found employment within a year, and for many, total income rose despite reduced transfers. We find precise zero effects on total health expenditures for both mothers and children. However, composition changes, including fewer family physician visits, indicate that mothers had less time to seek health care. We find precise zero effects on children's test scores and graduation, but modest reductions of intergenerational transmission of welfare.

Supplemental material, sj-pdf-1-ilr-10.1177_00197939221093562 for Firm Pay Policies and the Gender Earnings Gap: The Mediating Role of Marital and Family Status by Jiang Li, Benoit Dostie and Gaëlle Simard-Duplain in ILR Review

The authors assess the economic importance of K-12 schooling in Canada using two measures: the size of the sector and how central the sector is to the economy. They extend these measures by modelling a “new” sector – workers needing childcare in order to be available to work – which is not accounted for by conventional methods.

Using data from the Canadian Employer-Employee Dynamics Database between 2001 and 2015, we examine the impact of firms' hiring and pay-setting policies on the gender earnings gap in Canada. Consistent with the existing literature and following Card, Cardoso, and Kline (2016), we find that firm-specific premiums explain nearly one quarter of the 26.8% average earnings gap between female and male workers. On average, firms' hiring practices – due to difference in the relative proportion of women hired at high-wage firms, or sorting – and pay-setting policies – due to differences in pay by gender within similar firms – each explain about one half of this firm effect. The compositional difference between the two channels varies substantially over the life-cycle, by parental and marital status, and across provinces.

In the first chapter, I develop and estimate a model of life-cycle labour supply that incorporates the role of divorce. To do so, I set a collective model of household decision-making in an intertemporal context. The reduced-form literature has produced contradictory results on the effect of divorce and divorce risk on women's labour decisions. My model provides a unifying framework within which to view these findings. It also contributes to the structural literature, which has mostly studied how divorce alters bargaining power in marriage, and ignored women's insurance response to the risk of dissolution. I find that divorce risk decreases the lifetime expected income of married women, increasing their labour in all periods. However, this effect is mitigated over time, as women stay in and learn about their marriage. Among women who experience divorce, it exacerbates pre-existing differences across marriages. In the second chapter, we investigate the role played by education in the intergenerational mobility of Canadian children. We use the Longitudinal and International Study of Adults (LISA), a panel of integrated survey and administrative data covering 1982 to 2013. We estimate that the education level of children accounts for one third to one half of the correlation between their income and their parents'. Furthermore, our estimates show comparable experiences of intergenerational mobility across individuals with differing levels of education. Both results suggest untapped opportunities in the education system to improve people's mobility. In the third chapter, we exploit the Longitudinal Administrative Databank (LAD) to study the evolution of wealth inequality in Canada, from 1982 to 2011. Until now, research has relied largely on the Survey of Financial Security, which has sporadic coverage, under-coverage at the top of the wealth distribution, and a small sample size. We use the income capitalization method to take advantage of the higher-frequency data and large sample size provided by the LAD. Consistent with existing work, we find that the top 10% share was fairly constant over the period considered. However, our results differ in that we observe that the top 1% share grew moderately but steadily between 1995 and 2007.