Essays in labour and urban economics

In the second chapter, I assess the effect of highly subsidized social housing on both parents' labour market outcomes and children's long-term earnings and educational attainment. I document substantial reductions in parents' labour supply and earnings around program entry, with nearly no effect on net-of-housing-cost income. A simple time-allocation model, in which social-housing receipt both relaxes the budget constraint and insures parents against earnings risk, rationalizes these large labour-supply responses. Then, I exploit variation in the timing of entry and find that children with longer exposure to social housing achieve better adult outcomes. I demonstrate that increases in parental time are a key causal factor in improvements in child outcomes. These results highlight a previously undocumented critical trade-off between maximizing the return for children and parents' labour market participation. In the third chapter, we use Canadian matched employer–employee data to assess the sources of the union pay premium. Controlling for worker heterogeneity using a two-way fixed-effects approach, we find that unionized firms pay approximately 15 log points more than non-unionized firms. Roughly 40% of this gap reflects productivity differences between unionized and non-unionized firms, measured by value added per worker; the remainder reflects unions’ ability to extract rents for workers. Our estimates imply that unions raise pay among unionized workers by about 9 log points. The effect increases to roughly 11 log points in an extension that allows unions to affect returns to unobservable worker characteristics. In the last chapter, I study the effect of gentrification on incumbent residents. Although gentrification brings rapid demographic change to inner-city neighbourhoods and is often feared to displace low-income residents, evidence on its consequences remains limited. Using Canadian administrative tax files, I track incumbent workers’ mobility and income trajectories as their neighbourhood gentrifies, exploiting the timing of gentrification in a matched, staggered event-study design. I find no evidence of displacement, even among low-socioeconomic-status households; if anything, families in gentrifying neighbourhoods are more likely to stay longer, benefiting from improved amenities. I find no adverse effects on income trajectories, suggesting no negative repercussions for labour market outcomes.