Poverty Dynamics: Empirical Evidence for Canada (Working Paper 29)

Poverty (low income) dynamics are explored using tax filer data covering the period 1992 to 1996. The distributions of short-and long-term episodes are identified, and reveal substantial differences by sex and family type. Entry and exit models explore the relationships between poverty transitions and sex, family status and other personal and situational attributes. Duration effects on exiting and re-entering poverty are found to be important, and models including past poverty experiences point to strong "occurrence dependence" for poverty entry and incidence. Fixed-effect panel data models confirm the above, and reveal asymmetries in the impacts of household transitions on poverty.

Student Loans : Empirical Evidence and Policy Implications (Working Paper 7)

This paper first summarizes the results of an empirical investigation of borrowing and repayment patterns of post-secondary graduates, then addresses a number of related policy issues, including i) the need for further research to generate the information needed to fully evaluate the student loan system, ii) the advantages of extending the assistance available for those facing problems with their debt burdens in the post-schooling period, iii) the need to increase borrowing limits, iii) the efficiency and equity advantages of providing assistance to post-secondary students through loans rather than the grants which many have been calling for, and iii) a proposal for revitalising the cash-strapped post-secondary system with infusions from both federal and provincial governments and students themselves of equal parts, the latter facilitated by the appropriate changes in the loan system (higher limits and more support for those who run into trouble with repayment).

Leaving and Coming Back to Canada : Evidence from Longitudinal Data (Working Paper 32)

The paper exploits the unique strengths of Statistics Canada's Longitudinal Administrative Database ("LAD"), constructed from individuals' tax records, to shed new light on the extent and nature of the emigration of Canadians to other countries and their patterns of return over the period 1982-1999. The empirical evidence begins with some simple graphs of the overall rates of leaving over time, and follows with the presentation of the estimation results of a model that essentially addresses the question: "who moves?" The paper then analyses the rates of return for those observed to leave the country - something for which there is virtually no existing evidence. Simple return rates are reported first, followed by the results of a hazard model of the probability of returning which takes into account individuals' characteristics and the number of years they have already been out of the country. Taken together, these results provide a new empirical basis for discussions of emigration in general, and the brain drain in particular. Of particular interest are the ebb and flow of emigration rates observed over the last two decades, including a perhaps surprising turndown in the most recent years after climbing through the earlier part of the 1990s; the data on the number who return after leaving, the associated patterns by income level, and the increases observed over the last decade.

Dispossessing bare life: Towards a theoretical framework for examining power relations through economic development at the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa

In the past twenty years an increasing number of Global South nations have vied for the rights to host prestigious and expensive sport mega events. This trend requires significant reflection given the enormous economic costs of these events, which often produce little capital gain for the host nation (Whitson & Horne, 2006). Furthermore, sport mega events are often utilized for their symbolic capital (Belanger, 2009), which sometimes manifests through forcing people from their land for the sake of “beautification” (Davis, 2006). In this project, then, I asked how technologies of power were utilized by FIFA, corporate stakeholders, and the South African government to control people who were marginal to, or impeded the success of, the World Cup in Nelspruit, South Africa. This project consisted of two parts: the first involved constructing a theoretical framework for better understanding power as it operates through sport mega events in general. To this end I employed Marxian notions of the ordering of physical space, Foucauldian conceptions of sovereignty and governmentality, and Agamben’s (1998) state of exception to determine how particular bodies are constituted and controlled through sport mega events. In the second part, I applied this theoretical framework to the events in South Africa to better elucidate how people became displaced and killed because of the 2010 FIFA World Cup. I used South African popular news and documentaries as empirical evidence and conducted a discursive analysis of said news media. Through this coverage it became apparent that the mega event created the conditions in which new forms of rogue sovereign partnerships could arise through a historically and spatially contingent process of capitalism. The rogue sovereigns’ para-juridico-political orders, the discourses and practices of accumulation by dispossession as a tactic and effect of govermentality, and other historical non-capital subjectivities such as racial identity, all contributed to constituting Agamben’s state of exception in which people could be displaced, killed or left to die in the events surrounding the World Cup.