Essays on employment insurance, income mobility, and family income distribution

he Canadian labour market has experienced several changes in the past two decades. Government played a declining role in the labour market during the 1990s in order to cope with huge deficits from the late 1980s and initiated a fundamental restructuring of the unemployment insurance system in the mid-1990s. However, equality and opportunity become important policy issues as family structure changed, and there was a rapid increase in the number of immigrants. The first chapter of this dissertation studies the impact of the new employment insurance repayment provision. The second chapter examines levels of income mobility, while the third chapter discusses changes in the structure of family income distribution.;A stricter repayment policy was introduced in the Employment Insurance (EI) Act enacted in 1996. The first chapter examines the impact of this new provision on the probabilities of filing an El claim for eligible, laid-off workers. Due to a lack of experimental data, this study adopts regression and propensity score matching methods to evaluate policy effects. The results suggest that the new repayment policy has reduced the probabilities of filing a claim among workers whose annual income is equal to or greater than ;The second chapter uses a recently available Canadian panel survey---the Survey of Labour and Income Dynamics (SLID)---together with the Panel Survey of Income Dynamics (PSID) from the U.S. to examine the levels of income mobility for the entire population and particular subgroups. The results reveal that there is significant income mobility in both Canada and the U.S. and that poverty or high income is a temporary experience for most people. Mobility also varies across subgroups. Less-educated people and minority groups tend to experience persistent poverty. Immigrants to Canada experienced slightly longer periods of poverty, but they were less likely to fall back into poverty once their income increased. In terms of cross-national comparisons, it was found that Canada's redistributive system significantly increases income stability. In addition, there is evidence that low-income (or high-income) spell beginnings or endings in the U.S. are mostly associated with events concurrent with changes in labour earnings, while demographic events play a relatively important role in spell beginnings or endings in Canada.;The distribution of family income in Canada became more unequal between 1980 and 1997. The third chapter employs a conditional re-weighting procedure developed by DiNardo, Fortin, and Lemieux (1996) to assess the effects of changing family structure and changing characteristics of immigrants on family income distribution. The results show that the increasing trend toward single-adult families had a substantial impact on increasing family income inequality, explaining one-fifth of the increase in the Gini coefficient and one-third of the growth in the low-income rate between 1980 and 1997. Changing characteristics of immigrants also affected income distribution, particularly in the lower half of the distribution. It explained about one-third of the increase in the 50-10 and 90-10 ratios, and it was responsible for...