The paper considers the impact of potential minority (Francophone, American, European) ethnic (language, culture) discrimination on salary determination in the National Hockey League. Using player salary data for the 1989/90 season, a regression model of salary determination is constructed which includes variables measuring productivity (skills), market structure, and allows for several ethnic influences including minority discrimination, ethnically shaped consumer preferences and reservation wages. The basic conclusion is that wages are principally determined by productivity and market structure, and the only evidence of discrimination is found in the ethnically influenced consumer preference of American, as opposed to Canadian, teams.

We propose a new methodology for analyzing determinants of the wage gap between immigrants and natives. A Mincerian regression framework is extended to include GDP per capita in an immigrant's country of birth as a proxy for the quality of schooling and work experience acquired in that country. We find that Canadian immigrants' returns to schooling and work experience significantly increase with the GDP per capita of their country of birth. The contribution of quality of schooling and work experience to the immigrant wage gap is also examined. Lower human capital quality completely negates the endowment advantage that immigrants have in the areas of schooling and work experience. Since data on GDP per capita are available for most countries over long periods, the proposed methodology can be applied to analyze immigrant wage gaps for a large set of countries for which common statistics on natives and immigrants are available. JEL codes: J20, J24, J15, J61

This paper examines the nature of the differences in the wage gap between Canadian born males and immigrant males in Quebec and in the rest of Canada (ROC) over the period 1980-2000. Relative to Canadian born individuals, immigrants in the ROC have been consistently, and increasingly, faring better in terms of wages than immigrants in Quebec. We cannot conclude that this is a consequence of Quebec having different immigration policies than the ROC, as the wage gap would be even larger if Quebec attracted the same immigrants as the ROC, nor can we conclude that immigrants are more discriminated against in Quebec. We find that the increased differential in the Quebec-ROC immigrant wage gap mostly reflects changes in the premium earned by immigrants who become citizens over those who remain landed immigrants; this premium virtually disappeared in Quebec while remaining stable in the ROC over the period.

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An important feature of Canada is that it has two official languages, English and French, and that one of them, English, is also the international lingua franca. This situation may have particular policy implications. Within Canada, the Montreal metropolitan area presents an interesting case in point: it has a majority of native French speakers, an important minority of native English speakers, and many immigrants from various linguistic backgrounds who try to make their way into the labor market. Using confidential micro-data from the 2006 Canadian Census, this chapter investigates the determinants and the economic values of the use of different languages at work in Montreal. Workers are divided into three groups: French, English and Other mother tongues, and indices are defined for the use of French, English, and Other languages at work. It is found that the use of English at work by non-English native speakers is positively related to the education level of the workers, while there is no such relationship for the use of French by native English speakers. The returns to using at work a language that is different from one’s mother tongue are analyzed with ordinary least squares and instrumental variables regressions. For the English mother tongue group, using French at work has little or no reward, while using English at work pays a lot for the French mother tongue group. For the Other mother tongues group, there is a high payoff to using an official language at work, especially English. This situation is not due to the inferior economic status of the native French speakers; it is due to the fact that English is the international lingua franca. The policy implications of the above results are discussed.