Has Canada's 21st-Century Grand Gender Convergence Stalled? Male and Female Income and Human Resource Stock Distributions Viewed Through an Equal Opportunity Lens

The increasing similarity of male and female labor market roles in advanced economies over the past 50 years, dubbed the “Grand Gender Convergence” by Goldin (2014), appears to have stalled. Given commonality of preferences for work and human resource acquisition across the gender divide, women and men with similar human resources and efforts should have similar income distributions in a non-discriminatory equal opportunity equilibrium. However, income convergence is a necessary but not sufficient condition for a “Grand Gender Convergence” as similarities in incomes could be achieved with differences in human resources and efforts given discriminatory rewards. In this study, using new tools for examining distributional convergence processes, the progress of Canada's 21-st Century “Grand Gender Convergence” is examined in the context of an equal opportunity paradigm. While income convergence is almost universally apparent, human resource stock distributions appear to be diverging, with women having increasingly superior resources to men, evidence that the grand convergence is not progressing.     

Catch More to Catch Less: Estimating Timing Choice as Dynamic Bycatch Avoidance Behavior

Environmental and Resource Economics - We model harvesters’ temporal participation behavior in a fishery with individual quotas for both a target and bycatch species. Harvesters make...     

Are founding families less willing to bear risk? Evidence from the currency exposure and internationalization strategy of family firms

Although theory predicts that family firms should be less willing to bear risk than nonfamily firms, prior empirical papers have not found support for this prediction. In this paper, we focus on conditional currency risk because founding families can relatively easily influence their firms’ currency exposure. We find that family firms have relatively lower conditional currency exposure. This result holds for both descendant-led and nonfamily-led family firms. Consistent with purposeful actions of founding families, we find that exposure decreases with control-enhancing mechanisms, such as excess voting rights. The findings also support a wealth-preservation motive, evidenced by a finding that exposure declines with the number of family beneficiaries. Additional analysis suggests that family firms achieve the relatively lower risk by reducing internationalization depth and limiting exposure to riskier currencies.