A longitudinal analysis of earnings change in Canada

The most marked pattern of distributional change has been the rising (real) earnings of women, increased polarization of earnings among men, and a decline in the real earnings of Entry workers (age 20-24) for both men and women. [...] The cohort analysis shows steady upward shifts in the earnings profiles of those who entered the labour market in the 1960’s and 1970’s, followed by downward shifts for the 1980s and 1990s entry cohorts, consistent with the findings of Beaudry and Green; for the most recent (1990-1994) entry cohorts, however, the profiles appear to have steepened, suggesting returns to experience have increased fo [...] The final part of the present study re-examines and updates Beaudry and Green (2000a) using the actual longitudinal microdata of the LAD file and finds both confirmation and an intriguing difference for cohorts of the 1990s. [...] The most marked pattern of distributional change has been the rising (real) earnings of women relative to the median, with the proportions of female workers in the lower intervals declining and those in the upper intervals generally rising. [...] This is a two-dimensional array of earnings intervals with the initial year down the left-hand side and the subsequent year across the top, whose elements indicate the percentages of workers moving from earnings interval i in the initial year to earnings interval j in the subsequent year.