Volume 30, Number 4 (Fall) 1995
Baker, Michael, and Dwayne Benjamin. 1995. "The Receipt of Transfer Payments by Immigrants to Canada." Journal of Human Resources 30(4):650-676.
Using the native born as a benchmark, we examine immigrants' reliance on Canada's social safety net. Both in the raw data, and after conditioning on a variety of explanatory variables, we find that immigrants have lower participation rates in Unemployment Insurance and Social Assistance than natives. We also find that "assimilation" leads to greater participation and vintage which indicates more recent immigrant cohorts have higher recipiency rates than their predecessors, holding years in the country constant. The results for Social Assistance contrast with U.S. evidence that the raw entry participation rates of many immigrant cohorts exceed the native rates. Finally, our analysis of rent subsidies tells a different story, in which immigrants initially have higher rates of participation which fall with assimilation.
Michael Baker and Dwayne Benjamin are Assistant Professors at the University of Toronto. They thank David Card, Gilles Grenier, Nancy South, a referee, and seminar participants at Laval and the 1993 Canadian Economics Association Meetings for helpful comments. All errors remain their own. They also gratefully acknowledge the financial support of Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (Baker, Grant #410-93-0038, and Benjamin, Grant #410-92-0975). The data used in this article can be obtained beginning in June 1996 through June 1999 from the authors: Department of economics, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, M5S 1A1.
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