Suchergebnisse

We provide an overview of child benefit programs in high-income countries, particularly in comparison to the 2019 and expanded 2021 U.S. Child Tax Credit (CTC). Most countries included in our review provide child benefits that are more generous than the 2019 (and current) U.S. CTC, aligning more closely to the parameters of the now-expired 2021 expanded CTC. We show that while the expanded U.S. CTC was in effect, the U.S. significantly improved its ranking within the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in terms of lowering child poverty rates and the effectiveness of its redistribution system on poverty alleviation. Our cross-country analysis further reveals that the refundable and monthly payment structure of the expanded 2021 CTC was in keeping with prevailing models of child benefits internationally.

There is a widely held belief that older students, by virtue of being more mature and readier to learn at school entry, may have better academic, employment, and earnings outcomes compared to their younger counterparts. There are understated, albeit important, costs to starting school later, however. Compulsory school-attendance laws may allow these same older pupils to drop out of high school earlier, which could adversely impact their employment; entering the workforce later also has implications for lifetime earnings and remittances to governments. Overall, research suggests that school-age entry policies can improve student achievement in the short term, but the long-term impacts are currently not well-understood.

We use Statistics Canada's Labour Force Survey to explore the labor market impacts of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19). Specifically, we adopt a unique identification strategy to examine the heterogeneous causal effects of the COVID-19 economic shutdown by governments on hours worked across the earnings distribution in Canada, focusing on individuals who remained employed in March and April. Most early crisis analyses found that workers in the bottom of the earnings distribution experienced a much larger negative shock to hours worked than workers in the top of the earnings distribution. However, some low-income individuals are also working more as a result of the COVID-19 economic shutdown, and this nuance is missed when only considering the net effect. When we condition on whether workers lost or gained hours, we find that workers in the bottom of the earnings distribution experienced not only the largest percentage reduction in hours, but also the largest percentage increase in hours.

We design a hybrid guaranteed basic income and earnings subsidy for working-age Canadians that addresses federalism and work disincentive concerns associated with a conventional basic income by expanding the Canada Workers Benefit. We cost our program and propose a revenue-neutral financing model by consolidating provincial SA programs and eliminating several federal and provincial tax credits. We simulate the distributional effects of our program and financing on household disposable income across deciles and family types and discuss its impact on marginal effective tax rates and interaction with disability programs. Our program substantially reduces poverty rates among two-parent families and working-age singles and couples without children.

We examine the effects of the Universal Child Care Benefit on the labour supply of mothers. The benefit has a significant negative effect on the labour supply of legally married mothers, reducing their likelihood of participation in the labour force by 1.4 percentage points and hours worked by nearly one hour per week. In contrast, the likelihood of participation by divorced mothers rises by 2.8 percentage points when receiving the benefit and does not affect hours worked. Moreover, the benefit does not have a statistically significant effect on the participation of common-law married mothers or never-married mothers.

The initial wave of the COVID-19 pandemic generated large labour market disparities between men and women; however, in Alberta these differences did not persist beyond summer 2020. Instead, the pandemic continues to persistently and negatively affect the labour market patterns of parents with young children, regardless of the parent's gender. This finding should guide policy-makers when planning for the province's economic recovery.
Using data from Alberta up to and including the December 2020 release of the Labour Force Survey, we do not find evidence that the "she-cession" continued into Alberta's second round of health restriction measures. Instead, we find that school transitions to virtual learning, daycare closures, and parents opting for online learning resulted in profound and persistent effects on workers with young children compared to workers without children.
Recovery plans focusing solely on gender may be therefore insufficient for addressing the effects that different groups have experienced during the pandemic. Policy-makers should target policies towards both mothers and fathers with young children. Moreover, new policies should be aimed at supporting parents so that they do not face additional stress over how they will pay their bills and feed their families if they lose their jobs or must reduce their hours to stay home to care for their children.
The Canada Recovery Caregiving Benefit (CRCB) should remain in place until all threats of school and child-care facility closures are past. Alberta has received approximately $144 million in direct CRCB subsidies, but the weekly amount of $500 per recipient is less than minimum wage in a full-time job, meaning parents still may be unable to pay bills and meet their families' needs. The province should top up the CRCB for lower- or single-income parents.
Employment Insurance benefits should be made available to parents who quit their jobs to take care of their children as a direct result of public health measures. As well, those parents with young children who receive welfare payments should not be required to search for jobs while public health measures remain in place.
The Alberta government needs to work together with the federal government to provide adequate support to daycare centres and schools to cover the added pandemic-related costs. Alberta received $87 million in federal funding to help with those costs and has itself contributed $17.8 million to extra health and safety measures in daycare centres. This is money well spent, for when parents feel their children are in a safe place, they will not keep them at home and jeopardize or lose their own employment.
However, the end of the pandemic will not mean an abrupt end to its effects on the labour market. Even though this paper finds no differences in the situations of employed men and women, the latter may experience more labour market friction in the long run, due to missed opportunities for on-the-job training and work experience. One benefit that can come out of the labour market disruptions caused by the pandemic is a renewed focus on addressing pre-pandemic inequities between men and women with children. From this perspective, Alberta should celebrate and embrace the recent federal commitment to a Canada-wide early learning and child care plan.

The initial wave of the COVID-19 pandemic generated large labour market disparities between men and women; however, in Alberta these differences did not persist beyond summer 2020. Instead, the pandemic continues to persistently and negatively affect the labour market patterns of parents with young children, regardless of the parent's gender. This finding should guide policy-makers when planning for the province's economic recovery. Using data from Alberta up to and including the December 2020 release of the Labour Force Survey, we do not find evidence that the "she-cession" continued into Alberta's second round of health restriction measures. Instead, we find that school transitions to virtual learning, daycare closures, and parents opting for online learning resulted in profound and persistent effects on workers with young children compared to workers without children. Recovery plans focusing solely on gender may be therefore insufficient for addressing the effects that different groups have experienced during the pandemic. Policy-makers should target policies towards both mothers and fathers with young children. Moreover, new policies should be aimed at supporting parents so that they do not face additional stress over how theywill pay their bills and feed their families if they lose their jobs or must reduce their hours to stay home to care for their children. The Canada Recovery Caregiving Benefit (CRCB) should remain in place until all threats of school and child-care facility closures are past. Alberta has received approximately $144 million in direct CRCB subsidies, but the weekly amount of $500 per recipient is less than minimum wage in a full-time job, meaning parents still may be unable to pay bills and meet their families' needs. The province should top up the CRCB for lower- or single-income parents. Employment Insurance benefits should be made available to parents who quit their jobs to take care of their children as a direct result of public health measures. As well, those parents with young children who receive welfare payments should not be required to search for jobs while public health measures remain in place. The Alberta government needs to work together with the federal government to provide adequate support to daycare centres and schools to cover the added pandemic-related costs. Alberta received $87 million in federal funding to help with those costs and has itself contributed $17.8 million to extra health and safety measures in daycare centres. This is money well spent, for when parents feel their children are in a safe place, they will not keep them at home and jeopardize or lose their own employment. However, the end of the pandemic will not mean an abrupt end to its effects on the labour market. Even though this paper finds no differences in the situations of employed men and women, the latter may experience more labour market friction in the long run, due to missed opportunities for on-the-job training and work experience. One benefit that can come out of the labour market disruptions caused by the pandemic is a renewed focus on addressing pre-pandemic inequities between men and women with children. From this perspective, Alberta should celebrate and embrace the recent federal commitment to a Canada-wide early learning and child care plan.

We respond to concerns raised by Kesselman (2018) about our illustrative proposal on how to finance and implement a basic income guarantee (BIG) in Canada (Boadway, Cuff, and Koebel forthcoming). We demonstrate how our proposal could be adjusted to mitigate Kesselman's main concern of high marginal effective tax rates (METRs) and argue that the incentive effects, redistribution consequences, and public opposition are not as detrimental as Kesselman suggests. We also show that Kesselman's proposed alternate—an expanded Working Income Tax Benefit—could be incorporated into our BIG but would result in higher METRs and efficiency losses at some incomes.

We propose mechanism for implementing a two-stage harmonized Basic Income Guarantee with federal and provincial components. In Stage One, the federal government replaces its refundable and nonrefundable tax credits with an income-tested basic income delivered through the income tax system. The reform is revenue-neutral. In Stage Two, each province decides whether to implement a provincial basic income guarantee that is harmonized with the federal one but allows province-specific basic income levels. The provincial basic income replaces provincial refundable and nonrefundable tax credits as well as welfare and disability transfers, and is also revenue-neutral. All social services and contributory social insurance programs remain intact. An illustrative calculation using Statistical Canada's SPSD/M model shows the financial feasibility of a national BIG of $20,000 per adult adjusted for family size with a benefit reduction rate of 30%.

Income support programs introduced for workers during the first wave of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) lockdowns faced criticism for their negative labour supply effects. We propose that these concerns about work disincentives are embedded in restrictive assumptions about work and led to suboptimal design of crisis support policies. We describe a framework for analyzing alternative crisis income support programs predicated on more realistic assumptions of labour markets and human motivation. Our framework proposes that balancing efficiency, equity, and voice objectives should be the goal of crisis labour market policies. We argue that adoption of a basic income targeted toward low-income workers, in combination with Canada's pre-existing Employment Insurance program, would have balanced efficiency, equity, and voice better than the combination of the Canada Emergency Response Benefit and Canada Emergency Wage Subsidy. A targeted basic income would also have been more effective at achieving stated public health objectives.