No abstract

Using the Canadian General Social Survey we compute returns to post-secondary education relative to high-school. Unlike previous research using Canadian data, our dataset allows us to control for ability selection into higher education. We find strong evidence of positive ability selection into all levels of post-secondary education for men and weaker positive selection for women. Since the ability selection is stronger for higher levels of education, particularly for university, the difference in returns between university and college or trades education decreases slightly after accounting for ability bias. However, a puzzling large gap persists, with university-educated men still earning over 20% more than men with college or trades education. Moreover, contrary to previous Canadian literature that reports higher returns for women, we document that the OLS hourly wage returns to university education are the same for men and women. OLS returns are higher for women only if weekly or yearly wages are considered instead, because university-educated women work more hours than the average. Nevertheless, once we account for ability selection into post-secondary education, we generally find higher returns for women than for men for all wage measures as a result of the stronger ability selection for men.JEL Classification: J24, J31, I2, C31.

Program evaluation, Matching, Multi-treatment program, JTPA,

Using hourly and weekly wages from the Canadian Labour Force Survey from 2000 until 2018, workers were separated into full-time and part-time and the following striking observation was documented. The overall gender wage gap is larger than either the full-time pay gap or the part-time pay gap, even after controlling for detailed personal and job characteristics. This result is a consequence of two findings: (i) part-time wages are lower than full-time wages, and (ii) the majority of part-time workers are women. In aggregation, this brings down the average female wage, leading to a larger aggregate gender wage gap. This was further linked to a differential selection by gender into full-time and part-time work, with women of higher earnings potential being overrepresented in the pool of part-time workers, resulting in no gender pay gap in the part-time worker category. Policies targeted at encouraging full-time employment for women should therefore reduce the gender wage gap.

The literature on training has pointed out that macroeconomic fluctuations can have a positive or a negative effect on training decisions. On the one hand, the opportunity cost to train is lower during downturns, and thus training should be counter-cyclical. On the other hand, a positive shock may be related to the adoption of new technologies and increased returns to skill, making training incidence pro-cyclical. The first contribution of this paper is to document, using the Canadian panel of Workplace and Employee Survey, that (i) training moves counter-cyclically with aggregate output fluctuations (more training in downturns), while at the same time (ii) the relative position of sectoral output has a positive impact on training decisions (more training in sectors doing relatively better). This second fact is novel and unexplored. Overall, the results show that the firms' decisions to train are quite complex − in order to fully understand them, one needs to take into account not only the change in aggregates, but also the relative position of each sector in the economy. The second contribution of the paper is to illustrate the mechanisms at work by incorporating training decisions into a standard Mortensen-Pissarides model. In the standard model, production takes place if workers' productivity is above a reservation threshold. In our extension, this threshold gets expanded into a whole interval within which production takes place if workers are trained. The quantitative analysis from the calibrated model illustrates the counter-cyclical opportunity cost adjustment from aggregate shocks and the pro-cyclical adjustment coming from sectoral reallocation.JEL Classification: J24, E32