Christine NeillAssociate Professor of Economics 75 University Ave West, Waterloo, ON, N2L 3C5
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Research
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Parental Employment Effects of Switching from Half-Day to Full-Day Kindergarten: Evidence from Ontario’s French Schools
Full-day kindergarten programs are expanding across North America, driven by a policy focus on early childhood development. These programs also affect parents’ budget sets and may lead to changes in labour market outcomes. We examine parents’ labour supply response to the move from half-day to full-day kindergarten in Ontario’s French schools well before the same change was made in English schools. We find no robust evidence of labour supply effects for fathers in two-parent families and only some limited and modest effects for mothers in two-parent families. For single mothers, the estimates suggest large and statistically significant effects on employment and hours of work, in particular for working longer hours.
Rising Student Employment: the Role of Tuition Fees
In 1979, less than 30 per cent of full-time university students in Canada worked for pay during the academic term. By 2000 this had risen to 45 per cent. I find that no economic variable other than tuition fees – which can account for half of the rise – can explain this increase. Groups that saw the biggest increases in employment in response to tuition fee increases also had a relatively small enrolment response. The results suggest that the ability to increase earned income during the semester plays an important role in mitigating the effects of fee increases on individuals’ enrolment decisions.
Delivering Government Grants to Students Through the RESP System: Distributional Implications
The Canadian learning passport (CLP) proposal put forward in 2011 by the Liberal Party of Canada has interesting distributional implications. Replacing tax-credit-based aid to students with up-front funds through a registered education savings plan (RESP) could get more money to students while they are studying, which is likely one of the lowest-income periods of their lives. As well, the switch to the CLP would spread out student financial assistance based on parental income over a longer period of time, helping to ensure that some additional assistance goes to families that struggle during the period prior to post-secondary entrance, and not only during the study period. Unfortunately, though, current rules under the Canada student loan program (CSLP) would partially undo any attempt to provide increased financial assistance to students from low-income families through the RESP system. This could be ameliorated by changing the treatment of RESP withdrawals under the CSLP—a reform that would be sound policy whether or not a proposal like the CLP is ever introduced.
Can Infrastructure Spending Reduce Local Unemployment? Evidence from an Australian Roads Program
Studies of the effect of government spending on unemployment are potentially confounded by reverse causality. To address the endogeneity problem, we exploit variation in a pork-barrel road-building program, and find that higher government expenditure on road-building substantially reduces local unemployment.
Do Gun Buybacks Save Lives? Evidence from Panel Data
In 1997, Australia implemented a gun buyback program that reduced the stock of firearms by around one-fifth
(and nearly halved the number of gun-owning households). Using differences across states, we test whether
the reduction in firearms availability affected homicide and suicide rates. We find that the buyback led
to a drop in the firearm suicide rates of almost 80 per cent, with no significant effect on non-firearm death
rates. The effect on firearm homicides is of similar magnitude, but is less precise. The results are robust
to a variety of specification checks, and to instrumenting the state-level buyback rate.
Tuition Fees and the Demand for University Places
Estimating the effect of tuition fee increases on demand for a university education is complicated by the potential endogeneity of tuition fees. The relative homogeneity of university tuition fees within Canadian provinces and the role of provincial governments in university funding and policies, provides an opportunity to use changes in the political party in power to identify plausibly exogenous changes in tuition fees. The IV estimates suggest sizeable effects of fees relative to naïve estimates, and to previous Canadian studies – a C$1000 increase in university tuition fees is estimated to reduce the enrolment rate by two to three percentage points.
Do Gun Buy-backs Save Lives? Evidence from Time Series Data
Three recent papers have examined the effect of a national tightening of firearm legislation and gun buy-back
in Australia in 1996-1997 on firearm and non-firearm death rates. Despite analysing almost the same data, the
three papers reach rather different conclusions. In this article, we highlight key methodological concerns with
the papers. We also make some judgments as to the evidence on the effectiveness of the Australian legislation.
Drawing strong conclusions from simple time series analysis is not warranted, but to the extent that this evidence
points anywhere, it is towards the firearms buy-back reducing gun deaths.
Reducing the Burden of Student Loan Repayment: A Canada-US Comparison.
There are long-standing concerns about a student loan crisis in the US, either because of concerns about students who face extreme difficulty in repayment, or the possibility of widespread defaults on student loans leading to a broader decline in overall economic activity. Similar, though much less urgent, concerns have been expressed in Canada. In this chapter, I start from the premise that full forgiveness of current debt, along with an overhaul of financing systems that shifted all costs of future education away from students, is not feasible, and explore lessons from the U.S. and Canadian systems for the other I argue that key reforms in each country could alleviate the repayment burden, and make student loans a more effective and equitable part of the overall higher education finance system.
Natural Resource Shocks, Labour Market Conditions, and Post-Secondary Enrolment Rates
Commodity price booms can have important effects on labour markets and, as a consequence, potentially on inidviduals’ education decisions. In this paper we estimate that a decline in oil prices of around C$50 per barrel – around the same magnitude as the recent decline – would lead to an increase in university enrolments among 17-24 year olds in Alberta of about 3 percentage points relative to other provinces, but would have little effect on college enrolments. This effect is in addition to any effect of the oil price shock on enrolments that operates through the unemployment rate. If oil prices remain low, the Alberta government should expect to come under pressure to increase its spending on post-secondary education (universities in particular) despite the fiscal implications.
Remain, Retrain or Retire: Options for older workers following job loss
As the Canadian population continues to age, so does its workforce. There are concerns among policy makers that stark labour shortages may occur as the baby boomers enter retirement. There are also concerns that an ageing workforce is less mobile, less able to adjust to technological change and other shocks to the economy, and may be particularly hard hit by job loss. In this paper, we discuss policies designed to reduce the costs to older individuals affected by such labour market shocks and potentially improve the adjustment of the economy over the long run.
Education during a pandemic: a focus on girls and young women
High Quality Early Childhood Education: What Role in Waterloo Region?
What you Don't Know Can't Help You (Much), and Some Other Lessons of Behavioral Economics for Tax-Based Student Aid.
Canada’s federal and provincial governments spend a lot of money subsidizing postsecondary students. Tuition and education/textbook tax credits, in particular, cost the federal government around $1.6 billion in 2012 – a sum much greater than the net cost of the Canada Student Loan Program. These credits lower dramatically the cost of attending postsecondary education. Unlike other programs that support postsecondary education, there has not been a formal evaluation of the effectiveness of these tax measures, but there is good reason to conclude that they are poor policy. The immediate benefits of the credits go disproportionately to students from relatively well-off families, who are not relatively sensitive to the costs of postsecondary education, with students from lower-income families benefiting from them only after they have finished their education and have enough taxable income to claim the credit. Lessons from economics and from more recent innovations in behavioural economics emphasize that flaws in the design of postsecondary tax credits mean that they are unlikely to have any effect on youths’ decisions to undertake or cope with the costs of postsecondary education. A simple change to the tax credits – making them refundable instead of non-refundable – would go a long way to making them more efficient and equitable. Whereas a non-refundable tax credit can’t reduce the amount of tax owed to less than zero, a refundable tax credit can reduce your tax below zero and provide a refund. This change would provide a more immediate benefit to students from low-income families who need it most.
The Generosity of Student Financial Aid Programs in Canada and their University Enrolment Effects
The key objective of this work is to estimate the effect of student loans on university participation rates. Because student loan availability is universal in Canada, we cannot estimate the effect of student loan availability relative to non-availability. In this paper, we explore two different estimation approaches. In the first, we examine the effect of increasing loan limits. This would affect mostly youth from relatively low income families. In the second, we explore whether increasing the overall generosity of the program increases enrolments – this can affect individuals coming from families with a wide range of incomes. Our results show that increasing loan limits does increase enrolments, particularly (as expected) for students from low income families. We do not find any reliable estimates of the effect of broader increases in loan program generosity however.
PSE Switchers and Stickers: an analysis using the Youth in Transition Survey
The decision to enrol in post-secondary education includes a decision on an institution and a field of specialisation – a program of study. Students often decide that their initial choice of program was incorrect, and switch programs. This paper discusses the characteristics of those individuals who switch, and provides some preliminary discussion of the reasons why individuals switch. We briefly discuss some of the policy implications, including the extent to which government-provided student loan programs may affect individuals’ decisions.
Can we say whether the Canada Millennium Scholarship bursaries have affected post-secondary enrolments?
The Canada Millennium Scholarship Foundation (CMSF) was established with a $2.5 billion endowment in 1999, with the goal of distributing all its capital for the purposes of student financial aid between 2000 and 2010. The goals of the program were to increase access to post-secondary education, especially among students facing economic and social barriers, and to reduce student debt. This paper examines whether there is any evidence that the first of these goals was met, drawing on statistics on post-secondary enrolments and persistence, and examining the likely distributional effects of the bursaries. There is reason to think on theoretical grounds that the bursaries – which were primarily paid in the form of a reduction in student debt, and therefore primarily increased resources to students only once they were in repayment of their student loans (after leaving PSE) – would not have had very large effects. On the other hand, data on post-secondary participation shows there was a substantial increase in university enrolments and perhaps in some increase in university persistence after 2000. Unfortunately, it is impossible to attribute this to the CMSF bursary program because of the unusual way the program was implemented. It is unlikely that there is any reliable way to evaluate the effects on enrolments of the CMSF bursary program, even if more informative data were available.
Canada’s Tuition and Education Tax Credits
Valued at $1.8 billion annually, tuition and education tax credits are one of the largest forms of government support available to post-secondary students in Canada. The tax credits, however, have a very low profile, are underused and, most importantly, may be doing very little to encourage young people to pursue higher education. If the tax credits are improving neither access to Canadian post-secondary institutions nor the affordability of studies at those institutions, could a more creative use be made of these funds to expand student enrolment?
Tax expenditures vs budgetary expenditures for Canadian post-secondary education
Universally Subsidized Day Care and its Effects on Youth Crime Rates: Evidence from Quebec
Research from intensive, targeted early childhood intervention programs suggests they can have
large, long-run private and public benefits, much of which come from reductions in the propensity to
engage in criminal activity. That research is being used to advocate for increased government
expenditures universal early childhood programs. However, it is not clear that interventions would
have the same effects on the general population as they do on disadvantaged children. The
introduction of Quebec’s universally subsidized day care program in 1997 provides an opportunity
to take a first glimpse at the long run effects of a non-targeted early childhood program. Studies of
the short-run effects of the program show no evidence of improvements in child development in the
short run, but the long run effects have not been studied. We use a difference-in-differences strategy
to examine the policy’s effects on youth crime rates, using the rest of Canada as the counterfactual.
Overall, we find no evidence of large reductions in youth crime rates among the cohort of Quebec
youth following the introduction of subsidized day care relative to youth in the rest of Canada –
indeed, if anything, they appear to have increased. We conclude that caution is necessary in using
findings of large social benefits of early childhood education from small, intensive, targeted
interventions to draw conclusions that larger-scale universal programs implemented in a different
context.
Student loan limits and educational outcomes
Student loan programs are an important feature of post-secondary education systems around the world. However, there is little direct evidence on whether these programs are effective in increasing enrolments of credit constrained students. Unlike other countries, Canada has a system of student loans and grants that is based on combined provincial/federal jurisdiction, leading to policy differences over time between provinces. I exploit these differences to evaluate the effects of changes in maximum student loan limits on enrolments of young people. I find that although there is evidence that increasing nonrepayable assistance leads to increases in enrolments, loans appear to increase only the probability of youth living away from their parents’ house while studying
Students, economy pay a high price for at-home learning.
COVID-19 and Recent Post-Secondary Graduates
Post-Secondary Financial Aid and the Pandemic
Wealthier kids will benefit most from a tuition drop.
Ontario’s simpler, cleaner way to help students pay for tuition.
CWEN/RFE Report on the Representation of Women Economists in Canada (2015, 2017)
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