Abstract

This thesis consists of three essays on inter-provincial labour mobility in Canada.

In the first essay, we explore the concepts of provincial gross, net and share of net mobility rates across education and age groups using the Survey of Labor and Income Dynamics (SLID, 1993-2011) of Canada. Our results show that provincial mobility of young and more educated are more than their counterparts. The share of net mobility rates reveals that young and less educated individuals mostly have one-way interprovincial mobility. Moreover, inter-provincial migration using gravity model shows that the effects of border and population sizes of destination and original provinces have positive influences and distances have the negative influence on provincial migration. We also identify a positive correlation between provincial in- and out-migration in Canada. This shows that provinces that lose more people also seem to attract more people. Our analysis further illustrates that net provincial mobility has a stronger relationship with in-migration compared to out- migration.

The second essay examines the effect of local market conditions (LMC) on provincial mobility based on Canadian Survey of Labour and Income Dynamics (SLID) from 1993-2011. For measuring local market conditions at the provincial level, we consider two commonly used indices in the literature; one is based on employment growth (Bartik, 1991; Blanchard et al., 1992) and the other one is the unemployment rate. Our findings suggest that local market conditions of the original province rather than a destination province play a significant role in triggering inter-provincial migration. We find that less educated and young individuals are more likely to stay in response to increase in employment growth. However, in response to increase in the unemployment rate, less educated individuals are less likely, and young individuals are more likely to move out of the province of origin. To have a deeper look about the impact of the local market condition on provincial mobility we estimate five different frequencies of mobility. This suggests that shorter frequency of mobility provides more accurate picture how local market conditions affect provincial migration compared to census data. We also find that the effect of employment growth and the unemployment rate of the original province on provincial mobility, build up gradually. However, the effect of unemployment rates of the destination province on provincial migration declines over time.

Finally, the third essay represents the characteristics and the mover-stayer wage gap of provincial movers. Each year a considerable number of people move across provinces of Canada. Some provinces are losing, and some provinces are gaining skilled workers. However, there are not many studies investigate "Who moves and Who Stays behind." By using Canadian longitudinal data set "Survey of Labor and Income Dynamics (SLID)" from 1993-2011, we find that individuals from both education and age groups prefer to stay in Alberta and British Columbia, and Quebec is far behind than Ontario in retaining above average workers. This study also examines pre-move and post-move wage difference of provincial movers and stayers in the same locality. Our results suggest that the mover-stayer wage gap varies across education and age groups and also depend on the employment status. In analyzing the wage pattern of mover-stayer wage gap, our study also reveals that wage differential between movers and stayers disappears after few years of the provincial move. In analyzing occupational mobility among provincial movers our findings demonstrate that provincial movers remain in the same occupation earn the most and provincial mobility pays, but occupational mobility does not.