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"In recent years, international differences in work hours have been the focus of a substantial body of research. Much less attention has been paid to regional differences in working time in Canada, in spite of regional differences in average work hours that are of a magnitude that is similar to that of the Canada-U.S. difference in work hours. In this paper, we document regional differences in work hours across 6 regions of Canada for 2004, using a representative sample of 19,500 workers from the Survey of Labour and Income Dynamics. We also examine potential explanations for these differences."--Unedited text from document.

The objective of this paper is to introduce a new measure of the average duration of unemployment spells using Canadian data. The paper summarizes the work of Corak (1993) and Corak and Heisz (1994) on the average complete duration of unemployment in a non-technical way by focusing on the distinction between it and the average incomplete duration of unemployment, which is regularly released by Statistics Canada. It is pointed out that the latter is a lagging cyclical indicator. The average complete duration of unemployment is a more accurate indicator of prevailing labor market conditions, but some assumptions required in its derivation also imply that it lags actual developments.

In this paper we use administrative data associated with the tax system to: (1) document the extent of intergenerational income mobility among Canadian men: and (2) estimate the income disadvange (in adulthood) of being raised in a low income household. We find that there is considerable intergenerational income mobility in Canada among middle income earners, but that the inheritance of economic status is significant at both the very top and very bottom of the income distribution. About one-third of those in the bottom quartile were raised by fathers who occupied the same position in the income distribution. In fact, the income advantage of someone who has a father in the top decile over someone who had a father in the bottom decile is in the order of 40%. We also discuss some of the policy implications of these findings, as well as some of their limitations and the directions implied for future research.

In the fall of 2008, Statistics Canada, in partnership with Human Resources and Social Development Canada (HRSDC) and the Canadian academic community, put into the field the Canadian Household Panel Survey Pilot (CHPS-Pilot). This paper describes the background of the project, the steps taken in the development of the pilot survey, and the results of a series of explorations of the data collected.

Our objective is to obtain an accurate estimate of the degree of intergenerational income mobility in Canada. We use income tax information on about 400,000 father-son pairs, and find intergenerational earnings elasticities to be about 0.2. Earnings mobility tends to be slightly greater than income mobility, but non-parametric techniques uncover significant non-linearities in both of these relationships. Intergenerational earnings mobility is greater at the lower end of the income distribution than at the upper end, and displays an inverted V-shape elsewhere. Intergenerational income mobility follows roughly the same pattern, but is much lower at the very top of the income distribution.

In the fall of 2008, Statistics Canada, in partnership with Human Resources and Social Development Canada (HRSDC) and the Canadian academic community, put into the field the Canadian Household Panel Survey Pilot (CHPS-Pilot). This paper describes the background of the project, the steps taken in the development of the pilot survey, and the results of a series of explorations of the data collected.

This paper examines the robustness of a measure of the average complete duration of unemployment in Canada to a host of assumptions used in its derivation. In contrast to the average incomplete duration of unemployment, which is a lagging cyclical indicator, this statistic is a coincident indicator of the business cycle. The impact of using a steady state as opposed to a non steady state assumption, as well as the impact of various corrections for response bias are explored. It is concluded that a non steady state estimator would be a valuable compliment to the statistics on unemployment duration that are currently released by many statistical agencies, and particularly Statistics Canada.