ECON 3341 Labour Economics
ECON 3341 Labour Economics
You need to retrieve data on two variables (5 points):
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Consumer Price Index (CPI) for All-items, monthly, not seasonally adjusted, Canada as a whole and a Canadian province of your choice for January 2001-August 2020;
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Average Hourly Earnings for Employees Paid by the Hour, including overtime and unadjusted for seasonal variation. The data is available for several industries and by province: you want data for the “industrial aggregate excluding unclassified businesses” for Canada as a whole and a Canadian province of your choice for the period January 2001-August 2020.
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Use the data in you retrieved (CPI & Average Hourly Earnings) to calculate the real wage in August 2020 dollars (i.e. make August 2020 your base year). Report the wage data in nominal terms and your real wage series in a table and a graph. What has been happening to real hourly wages between January 2001 and August 2020? (10 points)
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Go back to the Average Hourly Earnings table on the Statistics Canada site and set the NAICS Industry to ‘All’, choose your reference period as August 2020 only and then click ‘Apply’. This will give you wage data for a detailed list of industries (you can get even more detail by clicking the boxes to the right of the ‘All box’. Scan through the wage data for August 2020. Which industries paid the highest wages? Which paid the lowest wages? How much did these industries pay? (10 points)
ECON 3341 Labour Economics
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Say that a person is employed during the survey week. Provide a list of job characteristics and working conditions that the survey collects data on (be sure to give the numbers of the questions that collect the information as part of your answer). See especially pp. 56-60 of the Guide. (5 points)
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Go to Section 2 of the Guide. This section discusses labour force status.
(i) People surveyed can be classified into three labour force states. What are they?
(ii) A particularly difficult state to measure in practice is unemployment. What three groups of people are classified as unemployed?
(iii) Have a look at Figure 2.1 which shows the questions and responses to the questions used to classify people into each labour force state. Based on the Figure summarize the paths (sequence of responses to questions) by which someone might end up categorized as unemployed.
(iv) The LFS definition of unemployed status in (ii) is quite standard but it is often argued that it leaves out some people who are probably unemployed. Suggest people who you might classify as unemployed but who would not be so classified by Statistics Canada. (10 points)
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Go to Section 4 of the Guide (starts p.18). The section deals with Survey Methodology.
(i) Section 4 claims that: “The LFS plays a central role in the national statistical system in several ways”. Summarize the three key roles it plays.
(ii) What groups are excluded from the survey?
(iii) The documentation notes that LFS follows a “rotating panel sample design”. What does this mean?
(iv) Because the LFS is not a random sample of the population a “weight” variable is included (see Section 6). What is the role of this weight variable? What would a weight of 50 mean? (10 points)
DETAILED ASSIGNMENT
