Previous research has shown particularly high life-time childrearing costs for professional women. These costs are a particular problem in developing countries where offsetting government subsidies and regulations are not yet in place.
In 2013, China amended its family planning policy to allow some couples to have a second child. I use this natural experiment to estimate the effect of being allowed to have an extra child on women’s employment.
There is a trend of declining real provincial appropriation income and increasing tuition revenues in Canadian post-secondary institutions. This research asks: How does a real funding cut influence the tuition fees paid by different types of students? It also takes the domestic tuition freeze policy effect into consideration.
I divide all Canadian higher education institutions into categories by their resource intensities, and take a look into which type of students indeed pay for the real funding cut.
Exchange traded funds (ETFs) are in line to become the next big hit on financial markets. ETFs are a specific category of financial instruments that aim at replicating the performance of an underlying basket of securities. Since they are relatively new, ETFs are met with growing enthusiasm in both academia and in the financial world and some start to wonder if their apparent convenience hides a darker side where they create distortions. I use the yearly Russell 3000 reconstruction to study the effects of ETFs ownership on three different measures of the value of the firms that compose the index.
Policy makers often fear high social assistance benefit levels will have negative employment and labor force participation effects. However, do these negative effects actually exist, and if so, how big are they?
My thesis uses new detailed data on social assistance benefit rules and changes across Canada to estimate the effects of social assistance benefit levels on employment. I find that large increases in assistance levels are associated with a modest decrease in the labor force participation rate of singles and single parents with one child. However, higher assistance levels actually increase the labor force participation of couples with two children.
