Research

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A NOTE ON CANADIAN MIGRATION TO THE UNITED STATES DURING THE 1980S AND 1990S

EXPORTING, DEMAND FOR SKILLS AND SKILL MISMATCH: EVIDENCE FROM EMPLOYERS' HIRING PRACTICES

PUBLIC-PRIVATE SECTOR WAGE DIFFERENTIALS IN CANADA: EVIDENCE FROM QUANTILE REGRESSIONS

Researchers

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Jean-William Portrait

Jean-William Laliberte

Associate Professor

University of Calgary

 Benjamin Milner Portrait

Benjamin Milner

Assistant Professor

University of Alberta

 Alex Portrait

Alexander Whalley

Professor

University of Calgary

New Economics Papers (from NEP)

The following works presented are external working papers published to the NEP-LMA and NEP-LAB RSS feeds. This content is provided to show a wider view of research being conducted across the areas of Labor Markets - Supply, Demand, and Wages, as well as Labour Economics. Works listed may have no relation to ACLMR or the ACLMR team and are published out of academic interest only.

Labour Markets

2025-05

The Heterogeneous Effects of Large and Small Minimum Wage Changes on Hours Worked: Evidence Using a Partially Pre-Committed Analysis Plan

In a study of recent minimum wage changes (Clemens and Strain, forthcoming), we demonstrate how analyses of longer-run impacts of policy interventions can be pre-specified as extensions to very short-run…

2025-06

Education and Earnings in Arkansas

This paper presents the first analysis for Arkansas using 2024 CPS data to examine education's impact on earnings and returns to investment. Average returns are 7.7%, higher for women (9%). University…

2025-06

Correcting Beliefs About Job Opportunities and Wages: A Field Experiment on Education Choices

We run a field experiment in which we provide information to students about job opportunities and hourly wages of occupations they are interested in. The experiment takes place within a widely-used career…

2025-06

The Rises and Falls of Piecework-Timework Pay Differentials. UK Engineering and Metal Working Industries, 1926–1965.

Based on payroll data of blue-collar male workers in the UK’s engineering and metal working industries between the mid-1920s and mid-1960s, this paper investigates piecework-timework pay differentials…

2025-06-01

Accounting for firms in ethnic wage gaps across the earnings distribution

Most studies of ethnic wage gaps rely on household survey data. As such, they are unable to examine the degree to which wage gaps arise within or between firms. We contribute to the literature using high…

2025-05

Meaning at Work

We evaluate a firm’s unusual, worker-centered, solution to the agency problem: enabling employees to reduce the cost of effort rather than pushing them with performance rewards. We randomize the roll-out…

2025-06

Labor Markets in Developing Countries

The process of development is accompanied by marked changes in the structure of the labor market. We lay out a broad set of stylized features that distinguish developing country labor markets from those…

2025-06-06

When Offshoring Threatens Jobs: Lifelong Education and Occupation Choice

The offshoring of manufacturing jobs has replaced low-skilled workers who often lack the relevant skills to transition to new occupations. Using Danish adult education and employer-employee data, we study…

2025-06

Teacher Gender Effects on Students’ Socio-Emotional Skills

Socio-emotional skills are recognized as key factors influencing both early and later life outcomes. However, there is limited evidence on how these skills are shaped within the classroom environment.…

2025-06-23

Rising Skill Supply, Technological Changes, and Innovation: A Quantitative Exploration of China

Can the expansion of higher education lead to firm productivity growth? In this paper, we examine how China's college expansion program contributes to the rapid growth of firms' R&D expenditure and…

2025-06

Successful Entrepreneurs Come From the Top of the Earned Income Distribution

Identifying high growth startups ex-ante and fostering their success is an important policy challenge. Using Swedish registry data, we show that previous labor market earnings of entrepreneurs is a simple…

2025

Basic Income and Labor Supply: Evidence from an RCT in Germany

How does basic income (a regular, unconditional, guaranteed cash transfer) impact labor supply? We show that in search models of the labor market with income effects, this impact is theoretically ambiguous:…

2025-06

When Parents Work from Home

This paper estimates the causal effect of parental right to work from home (WfH) on children’s educational attainment. Using administrative data from the Netherlands and variations in firm-specific…

2025-06

Reducing the digital divide for marginalized households

Digital skills are increasingly essential for full participation in modern life. Yet many low-income families face a dual digital divide: limited access to technology and limited ability to use it effectively.…

2025-06-12

Emotions related to time use in financial activities: Affective patterns in the US

This study examines how individuals in the US allocate time to financial activities and how these activities relate to their well-being. Using data from the American Time Use Survey (ATUS), we find that…

2025-03

Working from Home and the Consequences for Labour Turnover and Career Progression

In the wake of the rapid growth in working from home (WFH) there has been renewed interest in the impacts of this form of employment. One area of contention is job mobility and career progression. WFH…

2025-06

Early Withdrawal of Retirement Savings After a Severe Health Shock: Evidence from Linked Administrative Data

This paper examines how individuals respond financially to severe health shocks by analyzing early withdrawals from retirement savings following the initiation of cancer treatment (chemotherapy). Using…

2025-06-10

Estimating labour market power: the long and short of it

This paper combines two empirical traditions in the study of employer monopsony power. One tradition estimates static firm labour supply elasticities, while the other focuses on labour market flows, estimating…

2025-06-02

Place-Based Labor Market Inequality

This paper presents an overview of how various labor market indicators differ across geography. While many indicators are often discussed in terms of national aggregates, such discussions obscure the…

2025-06

The Gender Pay Gap in German Manufacturing: How Exporters Drive Wage Equality Trends

This study examines the gender pay gap in West Germany's manufacturing sector using linked employer-employee data. The gender pay gap has nearly halved for exporting firms since 1993 - a decline that…

2025-06

Preferences and the Puzzle of Female Labor Force Participation

Women’s educational attainment has continuously increased across the Middle East, while fertility rates have declined substantially. Yet their labor force participation remains stubbornly low. To investigate…

2025-05

Remote Work, Employee Mix, and Performance

We study the shift to fully remote work at a large call center in Turkey, highlighting three findings. First, fully remote work increased the share of women, including married women, rural and smaller-town…

2025-06-25

Temporary Agency Work and Labor Misallocation

user firms has received limited theoretical attention. This paper seeks to address this gap byfocusing on temporary agency work. We develop a two-period search model in which firmscan hire workers directly…

2025-06

The impact of school disruptions during the COVID-19 pandemic on parental labor supply and earnings in Australia

We use quasi-experimental variation in suspension of in-person teaching at schools to estimate the causal impact of school disruptions on parents’ labor supply. School disruptions have a large negative…

2025-06

Does Matching Contribution Incentivize Informal Workers to Participate in Retirement Saving Plans? A Randomized Evaluation Interacted with a Natural Experiment

We conducted a large field experiment in Peru on informal workers and studied whether offering them a matching contribution raise participation and contributions in their Individual Retirement Accounts.…

2025-06-04

Changing Jobs to Fight Inflation: Labor Market Reactions to Inflationary Shocks

We argue that inflationary shocks affect allocative efficiency by changing the rate and the characteristics of workers’ job-to-job transitions. First, using monetary policy shocks and survey data on…

2025

The Daughter Penalty

Looking at the earnings profiles of men and women after their first child is born, a number of studies establish that women suffer a larger penalty in earnings than men—a child penalty. Leveraging…

Labour Economics

2025-05

The Effect of Abortion Policies on Fertility and Human Capital in Sub-Saharan Africa

I evaluate the impact of abortion policies in sub-Saharan Africa to understand the potential consequences of a reduced international support for women’s rights following the overturn of Roe v. Wade.…

2025-06

Monopsony: Faith and the Child Penalty: Religious Affiliation and Gendered Earnings Losses After Childbirth

The relationship between parenthood and gendered labor market outcomes has been extensively studied, with the ‘child penalty'—defined as the effect of having children on mothers' labor earnings…

2025-05

Motherhood and Informality: Empirical Evidence from Russia

This paper investigates the causal impact of childbirth on women’s likelihood of informal employment in Russia using twenty years of RLMS. We apply an event study framework following Kleven et al. (2019)…

2025-05

Advising Job Seekers in Occupations with Poor Prospects: A Field Experiment

We study the impact of online information provision to unemployed job seekers who are looking for work in occupations in slack markets, i.e. with only few vacancies per job seeker. Job seekers received…

2025-06

Like Great-Grandparent, Like Great-Grandchild? Multigenerational Mobility in American History

Using data on 2.5 million great-grandchildren linked to their great-grandfathers in the US (1850–1940), we show that economic gaps persisted strongly across four generations despite major structural…

2025-05

DACA’s Uncertain Path: How Policy Threats Reshape Economic and Social Gains for Recipients

Since 2012, DACA has provided deportation relief and work authorization to immigrants brought to the U.S. as children. This study examines how legal and political uncertainty, triggered by efforts to…

2025-05

Beyond Time: Unveiling the Invisible Burden of Mental Load

This paper introduces a novel, scalable methodology to measure individual perceptions of gaps in mental load—the cognitive and emotional burden associated with \textit{organizing} household and childcare…

2025-06

Career, Family, and IVF: The Impact of Involuntary Childlessness and Fertility Treatment

We use whole-population linked administrative data from Australia to ex- amine the economic and mental health impacts of IVF treatment and invol- untary childlessness. Leveraging detailed information…

2025-05

Gender Norms and Female Labor Supply: Evidence from Export Shocks in Vietnam

We examine the relationship between economic development and female labor force participation, with a focus on the impact of gender norms. Analyzing quasi-random variation in provincial exports in reunified…

2025-06-16

Bilingual caseworkers and on-the-job training: A pathway to integration?

We study an active labor market program aimed at immigrants with very limited language skills. The program consists of a three-month on-the-job training program in a regular workplace, facilitated by…

2025-06

Parenthood Penalty in Russia: Evidence from Exogenous Variation in Family Size

The present study aimed to improve upon the existing correlational literature on the parenthood penalty in Russia. An instrumental variables approach based on sibling sex composition and multiple births…

2025-06

Racial Representation among Academics and Students’ Academic and Labor Market Outcomes

We study the impact of racial representation among academic staff on university students’ academic and labor market outcomes. We use administrative data on the universe of staff and students at all…

2025

Social Origins and Field of Study

Horizontal gender segregation in education negatively impacts both equity and efficiency in the labor market, contributing to disparities in career opportunities and economic outcomes. This paper examines…

2025-05

From Ethnic Prejudice to Employment Discrimination: The Role of Small Firms as Mediators

Hungary's sizeable Roma minority is hit by massive prejudice. Using 2011 Census data and supplementary sources, we study how ethnic bias translates to employment discrimination in local labor markets.…

2025-05

Women Political Leaders as Agents of Environmental Change

This paper explores how female political leaders impact environmental outcomes and climate change policy actions using data from mixed-gender mayoral races in Brazil. Using a Regression Discontinuity…

2025-06

Import Competition and Restructuring Strategies: Evidence from Japanese firm-level data

Using firm-level data from Japan, this study examines how firms restructure in response to import competition from China, with a focus on employment adjustments and industry switching. The results indicate…

2025-06

The Distributional Effects of Oil Shocks

Negative oil supply shocks since the 1980s have increased German inflation and reduced aggregate economic activity. Using 45 years of high-frequency German administrative data, we find that these shocks…

2025-06

Socioeconomic Disparities in Latin America among Same-Sex and Different-Sex Couples

Economic research on sexual minority individuals in low- and middle-income countries is limited due to the lack of representative data including information on sexual orientation. This paper uses census…

2025-06

‘Sorting’ Out Gender Discrimination and Disadvantage: Evidence from Student Evaluations of Teaching

How should gender discrimination and systemic disadvantage be addressed when more discriminatory and less generous students systematically sort into certain fields, courses, and instructors’ sections?…

2025-05

‘Based on Admin Data!’: How Administrative Data Fosters Young Economists’ Career

This paper examines whether access to administrative data mitigates or reinforces inequalities in academic careers. We study the VisitINPS program, which grants researchers access to rich administrative…

2025-06

Efficiency in Job-Ladder Models

This paper examines the efficiency of a decentralized equilibrium in a broad class of random-search job-ladder models. We decompose the source of inefficiency into two margins: (i) the investment margin,…

2025-06

The role of business visits in fostering R&D investment

Labor mobility is considered a powerful channel to acquire external knowledge and trigger complementarities in the innovation and R&D investment strategies; however, the extant literature has focused…

2025-06

Skills and the Regulation of Labor

This paper investigates the relationship between labor regulation and the skill composition of the workforce. Using a quantitative model calibrated to U.S. data, I show that labor market frictions induced…

2025-06-20

Bias in Mission-Driven Finance: Discrimination or Mission Drift?

There is a growing focus on the issue of inequitable lending practices. It has been demonstrated that institutions with a social mission are not exempt from the potential for negative bias. This paper…

2025-06

Who Benefits from Paid Family Leave? The Impact on Informal and Formal Care for Middle-Aged and Older Adults with Disabilities

This paper analyzes the impact of paid family leave (PFL) policies on informal and formal care for middle-aged and older adults with disabilities in the U.S., and how the heterogeneous benefits accrue…

2025-05-30

Modelling income risk dynamics in the UK: a parametric approach

This paper uses rich, administrative-quality data on earnings in the UK from the Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (ASHE) to provide a detailed analysis of income risk and its patterns across individuals…

2025-04-11

Improving the resilience of the UK labour force in a 1.5°C world

Climate change is already having a measurable impact on labour forces across the globe, with far reaching implications for economic growth, in addition to worker health, firm profitability, poverty and…

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Research Questions

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How will the asymmetrical role of the energy industry impact or compound employment issues as the sector adapts to global, political, and economic pressures?