University of SaskatchewanHARVEST
  • Login
  • Submit Your Research
  • About
    • About HARVEST
    • Guidelines
    • Browse
      • All of HARVEST
      • Communities & Collections
      • By Issue Date
      • Authors
      • Titles
      • Subjects
      • This Collection
      • By Issue Date
      • Authors
      • Titles
      • Subjects
    • My Account
      • Login
      JavaScript is disabled for your browser. Some features of this site may not work without it.
      View Item 
      • HARVEST
      • Electronic Theses and Dissertations
      • Graduate Theses and Dissertations
      • View Item
      • HARVEST
      • Electronic Theses and Dissertations
      • Graduate Theses and Dissertations
      • View Item

      Employer learning and statistical discrimination in the Canadian labour market

      Thumbnail
      View/Open
      pansythesis.pdf (943.3Kb)
      Date
      2005-03-07
      Author
      Pan, Shih-Yi
      Type
      Thesis
      Degree Level
      Masters
      Metadata
      Show full item record
      Abstract
      Statistical discrimination is frequently applied to illustrate different economic opportunities among equally able individuals. We use statistics from 1994, the second wave of the Survey of Labour and Income Dynamics, to analyze the income received from paid work jobs as the measure of an individual’s economic opportunity. At the same time, Heckman’s two-stage procedure is performed to account for possible bias that arises from estimating with only a pool of paid workers. We are interested in testing the following hypotheses: whether employers statistically discriminate among potential workers on the basis of education and immigration status if they have limited information about those workers and whether they learn to revise their judgments as new information is obtained. The results confirm the employer learning and statistical discrimination based on years of schooling hypotheses for the Canadian labour market. The labour market returns to initially unobservable characteristic increases with time spend in the labour market. In addition, wage becomes less related to education that employers initially use to infer an individual’s productivity. On the other hand, immigration status is not very informative about the productivity of a worker and the results do not support the hypothesis of statistical discrimination on the basis of immigration status. This paper points out the challenges faced by traditional labour market policies in a world of statistical discrimination and employer learning.
      Degree
      Master of Arts (M.A.)
      Department
      Economics
      Program
      Economics
      Supervisor
      Huq, M. Mobinul
      Committee
      Vaidyanathan, Ganesh; St. Louis, Larry; Altman, Morris
      Copyright Date
      March 2005
      URI
      http://hdl.handle.net/10388/etd-04062005-124813
      Subject
      Labour Market
      Immigration
      Education and Wage
      Collections
      • Graduate Theses and Dissertations
      University of Saskatchewan

      University Library

      © University of Saskatchewan
      Contact Us | Disclaimer | Privacy