SEDAP: Research Paper Abstracts (2012)



  1. Thoughts from a user of results of Statistics Canada's LifePaths Microsimulation Model
    Jacques Légaré

  2. As for more than ten years, my name has been many time associated with Statistics Canada’s LifePaths Microsimulation Model, I was asked to give my thoughts on it at the Seminar “On the Varieties of Computer Modeling: A Toolbox Approach to Analysis and Decision Making” organized by the Population Change and Lifecourse Strategic Knowledge Cluster in Gatineau (Québec) on September 28, 2011. After a narration of how I became user of results of LifePaths, I give a few examples that lead me to uncertainty because I am questioning my trust regarding methods and models used as well as data used.


  3. Retirement Lost?
    Lynn McDonald and Peter Donahue

  4. In this paper we raise the question, as to whether retirement is lost as we currently know it in Canada. Here we look at the retirement research according to the scope of retirement and the new retirement, possible theoretical developments, the timing of transitions into retirement and life as a retiree including the quality of pensions. On the basis of this selected review we propose that retirement is undergoing modifications based on several trends that commenced before the 2008 economic downturn. The data would appear to lean towards the emergence of a different retirement, insofar as the collective Canadian vision of retirement is lost, notwithstanding the economic meltdown in global markets.


  5. The Evolution of Retirement as Systematic Ageism
    Lynn McDonald

  6. Questions that people ask, when they hear that mandatory retirement has been repealing include: will people be forced to toil longer to stay financially healthy? Will they change careers later in life to keep their interest in a subject or explore new interests? How will working longer affect their health? How will much older people affect the ambitions and working styles of younger colleagues? Will companies have to change their health and benefit plans to accommodate older people? This chapter discusses implications for both individuals and companies about hiring/retaining workers beyond the mandatory retirement age including differences in power relationships that place older workers who love and want to stay in their job in a compromised position. Issues related to international political economy will be addressed.


  7. Immigrant Selection Systems and Occupational Outcomes of International Medical Graduates in Canada and the United States
    James Ted McDonald, Casey Warman, and Christopher Worswick

  8. We analyze the process of immigrant selection and occupational outcomes of Interna- tional Medical Graduates (IMGs) in the US and Canada. The IMG relicensing model of Kugler and Sauer (2005) is extended to incorporate two different approaches to im- migrant selection: employer nomination systems and point systems. Consistent with the predictions of our model, we find that, in Canada where a point system has been in place, IMGs are less likely to be employed as physicians than are IMGs in the US, where employer nomination is a more important entry path for IMGs.


  9. Real-Time Feedback and Residential Electricity Consumption: The Newfoundland and Labrador Pilot
    Dean C. Mountain

  10. A pilot study was undertaken in Newfoundland and Labrador to determine whether provision of a real-time feedback device is sufficient to provide residential customers with the information needed to reduce their electricity consumption. A panel based econometric methodology, which controlled for such factors as weather, appliance and housing stock, and demographic determinants influencing electricity consumption, was used to quantify the impacts of the realtime monitor in reducing energy (kWh) use. The study also provided some important insights about socio-economic factors that influence conservation responsiveness, a feature that may assist in developing targeted energy efficiency programs. For example, the electric water heating households showed a higher savings than non-electric water heating households. While positive attitudes toward conservation significantly increase the reduction in electricity when using the real-time monitor, seniors, in their employment of the real-time monitor, do not conserve as much. Overall, the aggregate reduction in electricity consumption (kWh) across the study sample was 18.1%. The paper describes the experimental design, the data collection, the evaluation model, the conservation results, and customers’ attitudes and perceptions regarding the real-time monitor.


  11. The Impact of Age Pension Eligibility Age on Retirement and Program Dependence: Evidence from an Australian Experiment
    Kadir Atalay and Garry F. Barrett

  12. Identifying the effect of the financial incentives created by social security systems on the retirement behaviour of individuals requires exogenous variation in program parameters. In this paper we study the 1993 Australian Age Pension reform which increased the eligibility age for women to access the social security benefit. We find economically significant responses to the increase in the Age Pension eligibility age. An increase in the eligibility age of 1 year induced a decline in retirement probability by approximately 10 percent. In addition, we find that the social security reform induced significant \program substitution." The rise in the Age Pension eligibility age had an unintended consequence of increasing enrolment in other social insurance programs, particularly the Disability Support Pension, which functioned as an alternative source for funding retirement.


  13. Changes in Subjective Well-being with Retirement: Assessing Savings Adequacy in Australia
    Garry F. Barrett and Milica Kecmanovic

  14. Does retirement represent a state of relative prosperity or a time of unanticipated economic hardship? To assess whether individuals are successful in smoothing their well-being across the transition to retirement we analyse measures of relative subjective wellbeing (SWB) in the Australian HILDA Survey. Specifically, this research examines individual's self-reported change in their standard of living, financial security, and overall happiness over the transition to retirement. It is found SWB either improves or remains constant for the large majority of individuals as they retire from the labour force. However, there are significant disparities in changes in well-being with retirement among retirees. In particular, the subset of individuals who are forced to retire early due to job loss or their own health, and who find their income in retirement to be much less than expected, report marked declines in their well-being in retirement.


  15. Health Care Expenditures, Public Administration and the Business Cycle
    François Béland and Co-director Solidage

  16. Claims of the unsustainability of Medicare abound and have been fuelled by the consequences of the 2008-09 economic recession. The looming question for Canadian public health care services is "How will public administrations in Canada sustain their health care expenditures during the next few years, given the pressure from debt recovery and the new federal payment transfer for health care?” To examine these issues, variations from 1989 to 2009 in Canadian public administration health care expenditures (HCE) are compared with variations in GDP, in public administration revenue, their expenditures on items other than health care, transfer payments for health from the federal government to provinces, and debt charges. Since the turn of the millennium, Canadian public administrations have increased HCE in constant dollars in context of: 1) decreasing share of public revenue and expenditures in terms of GDP; 2) constant share (70%), since 1996, of expenditures for items other than health care on total expenditures ; 3) parallel trends, with a 3 year lag, for GDP and expenditures for services covered by Medicare; 4) constant share of total HCE in terms of public administration total revenues from 2003 to 2007; 5) constant share of federal transfers for health on provincial public administration expenditures for total health care and for Medicare; and 6) reverse trends for share of HCE and debt charges. Given this context, the rhetoric of apocalyptic share of HCE on public administration budget is having a boost, while increases in this share has more to do with the factors included in the denominator rather than with those in the numerator.


  17. An Inventory of Canadian Microsimulation Models
    Yann Décarie, Michaël Boissonneault and Jacques Légaré

  18. The first aim of this document was to produce the most complete list as possible of the microsimulation models developed in Canada in the last two decades. Morever, information was provided about the people or entities that participated in their production, as well as about the researchers who used them and the papers in which they were mentioned. All these informations were found online, more particularly on the web pages of the various workshops of the International Microsimulation Association (IMA) as well as on Statistics Canada‘s Internet page.


  19. Changements épidémiologiques au Canada: Un regard sur les causes de décès des personnes âgées de 65 ans et plus, 1979-2007
    Marie-Pier Bergeron Boucher

  20. With a lower and lower mortality at younger ages, gains in life expectancy are heavily dependent on improvements in old age survival. However, over the last three decades, life expectancies at ages 65 and 85 did not show a constant rate of progress. Changes in life expectancy come from variations in the prevalence of specific causes of death trends and their interactions. The present thesis looks at the contribution of some causes of death on the changes observed in life expectancies and also at the trends in cause-specific death rates for Canada between 1979 and 2007. Results show that progresses in life expectancy at ages 65 and 85 are still mainly due to decreasing mortality from cardiovascular diseases. However, cardiovascular diseases are not the only causes of death to contribute to the gains in life expectancy. Death rates from the ten leading causes of death in Canada have all declined since the turn of the Century, but with different pathways from 1979 on.


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Last revised: October 10, 2012.