By Isabella Mira, Queen’s Law & Economics

Canada is a country built by immigrants. It is known for its multiculturalist approach to welcoming these newcomers and uses a points system to select immigrants. This method of screening has received much praise from economists and policy-makers alike for its ability to identify applicants that will answer the varying demands of the labor market. As an immigrant myself, this initial description is both reassuring and inspiring.

Yet a component often forgotten is that attracting and screening immigrants is only half the battle. Once they arrive, it is just as important to ensure immigrants’ skills and assets are properly integrated into the labour market and the Canadian economy.  Reports on Canada’s immigration policy reflects this gap in analysis by offering both positive and negative accounts of immigrant success in Canada. Statistics and articles such as OECD report a positive picture by stating that employment of foreign-born Canadian citizens has increased since 2008, and in 2012 Canada had the third highest employment rate for immigrants among the OECD member countries (Canada, 2014). In sharp contrast, articles by Ley and Smith (2008) discuss extensive immigrant poverty in gateway cities, Bloemraad (2006) speaks to non-economic factors such as possession of cultural knowledge as barriers to immigrant success, and Derwing et al. (2000) present the now-familiar issue of foreign credential recognition. These conflicting accounts invite questions as to the true success of Canada’s immigration policy.

In my M.A. essay, I propose an approach to reconcile these different accounts of immigrant labour market integration. I posit that the decision to ascend to citizenship acts as a signaling tool for employers.Read More »

By Gregor Smith, Queen’s University

The Canadian dollar (CAD) often is described as a ‘commodity currency’ or even as a ‘petrocurrency’.   The correlation between commodity prices and the value of the CAD features in daily commentary but you can see it in data at any frequency.

The figure below shows monthly data for the CAD/USD exchange rate along with the Bank of Canada’s commodity price index (reported in real USD) over the past thirty years.  Clearly, these two things tend to move together.Read More »

Queen’s PhD candidate and JDI Student Fellow, Jenny Watt, discusses research presented at the Joint Bank of Canada-John Deutsch Institute Workshop on Financial Intermediation and Regulation. 

By Jenny Watt, JDI Fellow

Andrea Pozzi of the Einaudi Institute for Economics and Finance recently presented research on the consequences of financial illiteracy on mortgage rates. Using data containing 90% of Italian mortgages, he and his co-authors show that not only do consumers who are susceptible to bad advice from banks pay higher rates—their presence in the market causes higher rates for all consumers.Read More »

 

JDI Student Fellow Stephen Snudden offers his insights into the internationally coordinated effort to combat the Great Recession following the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008. At the time he was a Research Assistant at the Bank of Canada and has also served as a Project Officer for the International Monetary Fund.  He is currently a PhD Candidate and in the Department of Economics at Queen’s University. 

 

By Stephen Snudden, Queen’s University

A 2% fiscal stimuli to combat the Great Recession

It was October 7^th 2008. Lehman Brothers had just collapsed in mid-September and seemingly taken the global economy with it. Markets were in hysteria. We needed to figure out what to do quickly.Read More »