The Impact of Sunday Shopping Deregulation an Employment and Hours of Work in the Retail Industry: Evidence from Canada

Using aggregate data on employmnet and hours of work from four Canadian provinces at two levels of the retail trade industry, I estimate a simple dynamic labour demand model in order to examine retail firm responses to Sunday shopping deregulation. The estimates suggest that among general merchandise stores deregulation resulted in long run increases in both the employment level and average weekly hours of work. In contrast, among more specialized retail establishments there is only evidence of an increase in average weekly hours. In addition, despite evidence of an immediate shortfall in the total labour input employed by general merchandise stores below the long run optimal level, the results suggest that these firms were unable to compensate by temporarily increasing the hours of their existing employees.

Perinatal Family Labour Supply: Historical Trends and the Modern Experience

The predominant perspective on perinatal family labour supply in the theoretical and empirical economics literature is that careers and children are simultaneous choices, so conditioning on the prenatal career ambitions of individuals, and particularly women, the event of a birth has little or no effect on labour market behaviour. There are, of course, many reasons to believe that this “allor- nothing” view, rooted in assumptions of perfect foresight, overlooks significant labour market effects of children and that due to various trends, including rising correlation in husband-wife earnings, these effects may becoming increasingly important. Using historical Canadian Census data and rich longitudinal microdata, I use nonparametric techniques to identify discontinuities in employment probabilities, hours of work and wage outcomes of parents, and particularly dualcareer couples, in the months just before and after a first birth. The evidence indicates that although the vast majority of new mothers and fathers who were employed prior to birth, maintain that employment, a non-trivial percentage of women (roughly 20%) appear to give up employment entirely after a birth and roughly half of them will not have returned to work 5 years later. More importantly, the percentage that drop out of the labour force is increasing and has been for at least the past two decades. This decrease is particularly evident among more educated and older women. Further, among new mothers and fathers who maintain their employment through the perinatal period, there is evidence of other types of labour supply adjustments including significant decreases (mothers) and increases (fathers) in both usual monthly hours of work and hourly wages. There is also evidence of increased probabilities of job changing in the year just before and after the birth for fathers, but not for mothers. Together these findings provide a much richer perspective on how today’s dual-career families balance work and child rearing. In terms of its policy relevance, the findings emphasize the importance of measures that support parents in balancing work and family time, as opposed to measures that are focused on enabling parents, and particularly women, to maintain uninterrupted careers while raising children.

Explaining the Deteriorating Entry Earnings of Canada’s Immigrant

The study explores causes of the deterioration in entry earnings of Canadian immigrant cohorts by estimating an empirical specification that nests a number of competing explanations found in the Canadian literature. To do this, we use the pooled sample of Canadian-born and immigrant men employed full-year, full-time from the complete 20 percent samples of the 1981, 1986, 1991, 1996 and 2001 Canadian Censuses. Our results indicate that no more than one-third of the deterioration can be explained by compositional shifts in the knowledge of an official language, mother tongue and region of origin of recent immigrant cohorts. We also find little or no evidence that declining returns to foreign education are responsible. Roughly one-third of the deterioration appears to be due to a persistent decline in the returns to foreign labour market experience which has occurred almost exclusively among immigrants originating from non-traditional source countries. We are able to explain two-thirds of the overall decline in the entry earnings of Canada’s most recent immigrants without any reference to entry labour market conditions. When we also account for entry conditions, our results suggest that Canada’s immigrants who arrived in the 1995-1999 period would otherwise be enjoying entry earnings that were significantly higher than the entry earnings of the 1965-1969 cohort.immigration, entry earnings, cohort effects, earnings assimilation, credentials

Immigrant Wage Assimilation and the Return to Foreign and Host-Country Sources of Human Capital

We compare predicted relative immigrant wage profiles based on returns to YSM and to foreign and host-country sources of schooling and experience. We find the biases inherent in inferring assimilation from a return to YSM appear more substantial than those emanating from the assumptions necessary to estimate foreign and host-country returns directly using standard data sources. Given the policy relevance of allowing entry effects and subsequent wage growth to depend on the foreign human capital immigrants bring and their post-migration schooling and work decisions, our findings suggest the predominance of YSM models in the literature is not well founded.Immigrant workers; wage differentials; human capital

Tax Incentives for Entrepreneurship

The need for funds is a crucial aspect of entrepreneurial work, and one that the United State government has decided to provide aid to entrepreneurs. This aid has resulted in subsidies, tax breaks, and tax reductions. This study will involve quantitative as well as qualitative research looking at Census Reports, Literary Works, as well as, the overall economic changes that have occurred since these credits have been introduced to try and deduce if any correlation between the two. This will allow for an in-depth understanding of the impact of tax credits on entrepreneurs and the surrounding community.https://digitalcommons.brockport.edu/research_posters/1020/thumbnail.jp

A Top-Down Approach to Managing Variability in Robotics Algorithms

One of the defining features of the field of robotics is its breadth and heterogeneity. Unfortunately, despite the availability of several robotics middleware services, robotics software still fails to smoothly handle at least two kinds of variability: algorithmic variability and lower-level variability. The consequence is that implementations of algorithms are hard to understand and impacted by changes to lower-level details such as the choice or configuration of sensors or actuators. Moreover, when several algorithms or algorithmic variants are available it is difficult to compare and combine them. In order to alleviate these problems we propose a top-down approach to express and implement robotics algorithms and families of algorithms so that they are both less dependent on lower-level details and easier to understand and combine. This approach goes top-down from the algorithms and shields them from lower-level details by introducing very high level abstractions atop the intermediate abstractions of robotics middleware. This approach is illustrated on 7 variants of the Bug family that were implemented using both laser and infra-red sensors.Comment: 6 pages, 5 figures, Presented at DSLRob 2013 (arXiv:cs/1312.5952

Evaluating the performance of methods for dual-function radar communications

Dual-Function Radar Communications (DFRC), where a radar and communications function is performed by the same antenna or array, has recently begun to be investigated as a means of alleviating or coping with spectrum congestion. O'Connor and O'Donoughue investigated continuous wave DFRC and this thesis focuses on extending O'Connor and O'Donoughue's treatment to pulsed radar operations. Timesharing, aperture partitioning, and simultaneous dual-beam (SDB) are compared by spectral efficiency across the amount of power allocated to the communications function, distance, and pulse repetition frequency (PRF). Each DFRC method is also evaluated on its performance on parameter estimators, beamwidth, and detection effects

The implementation of a behavior based safety program in conjunction with substance abuse screens to reduce incidents and accidents

Behavior Based Safety has become a growing concern in many workplaces over the last decade. Many companies do not have a strong safety program to protect themselves, as well as their employees, from human error incidents and accidents caused from the use of substances. This technical report investigates the connection between the frequency of drug and alcohol screenings to the incident and accident rate each year at a specific lumber facility in the Northwest United States. The lumber facility experienced several policy changes due to reoccurring incidents and accidents. The most common abused substances included: marijuana, alcohol, and tobacco. These policy changes included the addition of pre-employment and post-accident screenings, random drug and alcohol screens, reasonable suspicion drug and alcohol screens, and observed substance abuse screens. Data collected over a four year and eight month period did not detect a direct relationship among incident and accident rates. Although there wasn\u27t a correlation, substance abuse was proven to have a positive connection with workplace safety at the lumber facility

Specialization vs Diversification: The Rise and Fall of Windsor-Essex’s Automotive Industry

There is a longstanding debate between economic specialization, focussing on the production of a limited set of goods, and economic diversification, producing a wide variation of goods and services. While economic diversity boasts a stable and resilient economy, specialization claims to lead to rapid growth. This study explores both schools of thought, examining the strengths and weaknesses of both approaches, and applies them to Windsor-Essex as a case study on the city’s reliance on the automotive industry. This paper explores the rise of the automotive industry from the 1970s, examines unemployment rates following economic downturns, analyzes the economic state of the city, and hypothesizes on the future of the industry as recent investments in Electric Vehicle (EV) production have been made. This paper determines that Windsor’s specialization in the manufacturing industry has been harmful to the city over the past two decades through its volatility and vulnerability following economic shocks; however, the city is being presented with a unique opportunity to pivot to sustainable transportation, an emerging and promising market, if it properly capitalizes on current and future funding