The Economic Returns to the Knowledge and Use of a Second Official Language: English in Quebec and French in the Rest-of-Canada

In a country with two official languages, such as Canada, the demand for bilingualism may lead individuals born with one mother tongue to acquire the second official language. Knowledge of an additional official language may be associated with enhanced earnings for two reasons; its actual value in the workplace, or its value as a screening mechanism for ability. Previously available data did not indicate whether bilingual language skills were actually being used at work. However, the 2001 Census reports, for the first time, the primary and the secondary languages that an individual uses at work. Conditioning on both language knowledge and language use allow us to estimate the additional earnings that can be attributed to the use of a second official language. We find very substantial, statistically significant, rewards to second official use in Quebec and much smaller, not statistically significant, effects in the Rest-of-Canada.Wages, language knowledge, language use

Real Wage Chronology

We process information in a large number of Canadian wage contracts, signed over a period of several decades, to generate the long-run history of the real wage for each bargaining pair. We term these hitherto unexamined histories ‘chronologies’. We are able to generate 1574 continuous real wage chronologies and we examine the evolution of the real wage in each case. We explore the influence of productivity growth, the labour relations record of the pair, the influence of industry and region as well as the initial wage on the growth of the real wage rate over the decades in the sample. We also consider the relation between the mean and variance of the real wage contained in these chronologies.Wages, productivity, labour relations, compensating differentials,convergence.

Wage Rigidity in Canadian Collective Bargaining Agreements

We examine wage-change distributions in Canadian union contracts for evidence of downward nominal wage rigidity. Its probability increases substantially during low-inflation periods. During such periods, we discern no reduction in the incidence of real wage cuts. However, their magnitude is modest, suggesting that the labour market may not function as smoothly.nominal, real, wage rigidity

The Economic Returns to a Second Official Language: English in Quebec and French in the Rest-of-Canada

Canada is a country with two official languages, French and English. The need for both languages in Quebec and the Rest-of-Canada (ROC) generates a demand for bilingualism and investment in the acquisition of a second official language. Knowledge of an additional language may be associated with enhanced earnings because it may reflect what might generically be called ‘ability’ bias or because it may actually be useful at the workplace. Until now, available data did not indicate whether bilingualism was actually being used at work. However, the 2001 Census reports, for the first time, whether an individual is bilingual and the extent to which this skill is actually used at work. Conditioning on both knowledge and use allows us to measure the additional earnings which accrue to the use of a second language more cleanly. We find very substantial, statistically significant, rewards to second official language use in Quebec and much smaller, not statistically significant, effects in the ROC.wages, language knowledge, language use

Real Wage Determinatioan in Collective BArgaining Agreements

This paper studies the determinants of real wage rates using data on Canadian labour contracts signed between 1978 and 1984. Its results are consistent with Dunlop's neglected (1944) hypothesis that real pay movements are shaped by product price changes (contrary to the predictions of implicit contract theory and other models of wage inflexibility). The level of the unemployment rate is found to lower the real wage level with an elasticity between -0.04 and -0.13, whereas a Phillips Curve specification which relates wage changes to the level of the unemployment rate is not convincingly supported by the data. These results may be seen as consistent with the view that collective bargaining is a form of rent-sharing in which external unemployment weakens workers' bargaining strength.

The Determinants of University Participation in Canada (1977−2003)

The decision to attend university is influenced by the balance of the expected returns and costs of attending university, by liquidity constraints and capital market imperfections that may modify these calculations and, hence, by the family income of prospective students. Family circumstances also play a role. We examine the secular increase in the propensity of children from Canadian families, evident in annual surveys spanning two and a half decades, to attend university. We quantify the importance of these factors taking account of the greater propensity by young women than men to attend university and controlling for secular trends in socioeconomic norms that impinge on these decisions.university participation, parental education, university premium, gender, tuition, income, societal trends

The Gender Imbalance in Participation in Canadian Universities (1977-2005)

More females than males have been attending Canadian universities over the past decade and this gender imbalance in university participation has been increasing. We use the Linear Probability and Logit models to investigate the determinants of attending university and explore the reasons for the increasing gender imbalance. We find that, in gender-specific equations, the values of the coefficients attached to variables and the values of the variables themselves are both important in explaining the rising level of the university participation rate for women and men. The important variables include a time trend to capture the evolving societal norms, the dynamic influence of parental education, the earnings premium for a university degree, tuition fees and real income. The increasing gap between the female and male participation rates (15 percentage points by 2005) can be accounted for equally by differences in the coefficients in female and male participation equations and the widening gap in the university premium for women and men.University participation, individuals, gender, Canada

The Gender Wage Gaps, 'Sticky Floors' and 'Glass Ceilings' of the European Union

We consider and attempt to understand the gender wage gap across 24 EU member states, all of which share the objective of gender equality, using 2007 data from the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions. The size of the gender wage gap varies considerably across countries and selection corrections affect the offered gap, sometimes substantially. Most of the gap cannot be explained by the characteristics available in this data set. Quantile regressions show that, in most countries, the wage gap is wider at the top of the wage distribution ('glass ceilings') and, in fewer countries, it is wider at the bottom of the wage distribution ('sticky floors'). These features are related to country-specific characteristics that cannot be evaluated at the member state level. We use the cross-country variation in this large sample of member states to explore the influence of (i) policies concerned with reconciling work and family life and (ii) wage-setting institutions. We find that policies and institutions are systematically related to unexplained gender wage gaps.gender wage gap, selection, quantile effects, work-family reconciliation, wage-setting institutions

Risk exchange with distorted probabilities

An exchange economy is considered,where agents (insurers/banks) trade risks. Decision making takes place under distorted probabilities, which are used to represent either rank-dependence of preferences or ambiguity with respect to real-world probabilities.Pricing formulas and risk allocations,generalising the results of Bühlmann (1980,1984) are obtained via the construction of aggregate preferences from heterogeneous agents’ utility and distortion functions. This involves the introduction of a novel ‘collective ambiguity aversion’ coefficient. It is shown that probability distortion changes insurers’behaviour, who trade not only to share the aggregate market risk, but are also found to bet against each other.Moreover,probability distortion tends to increase the price of insurance (increase asset returns). While the cases of rank-dependence and ambiguity are formally similar,an important distinction emerges as for rank-dependent preferences equilibria are determinate, while for ambiguity they are generally indeterminate

A robust enhancement to the Clarke-Wright savings algorithm

We address the Clarke and Wright (CW) savings algorithm proposed for the Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem (CVRP). We first consider a recent enhancement which uses the put first larger items idea originally proposed for the bin packing problem and show that the conflicting idea of putting smaller items first has a comparable performance. Next, we propose a robust enhancement to the CW savings formulation. The proposed formulation is normalized to efficiently solve different problems, independent from the measurement units and parameter intervals. To test the performance of the proposed savings function, we conduct an extensive computational study on a large set of well-known instances from the literature. Our results show that the proposed savings function provides shorter distances in the majority of the instances and the average performance is significantly better than previously presented enhancements