Enrollment Responses to Labour Market Conditions: A Study of the Canadian Market for Scientists and Engineers

Sumon Majumdar and Katsumi Shimmotsu

No 273581, Queen's Economics Department Working Papers from Queen's University - Department of Economics

Abstract: As Canada increasingly structures itself towards a “knowledge based economy”, the supply of high-skilled professionals such as engineers and other science graduates acquires more importance. Following the theoretical framework developed by Ryoo and Rosen (2004), we develop and estimate a dynamic supply and demand model for engineers and scientists in Canada. We find that the estimated stock-flow dynamics are supportive of the theoretical model. The relative employment of engineers is quite sensitive to research and development (R&D) expenditures as a fraction of GDP, particularly after 1997. We then use the estimates to develop a dynamic impulse response function. Looking at the impact of a permanent increase in allocation towards R&D, we find that the adjustment process is relatively smooth and the market adjusts in about 2 to 8 years (plus the four years of natural lag in production) to within 80% of the final steady state. For a one-time improvement in R&D allocation, we find that under rational expectations, there is an initial increase in the number of science graduates, but then it falls to below the steady state value and remains there for a long period as the initial increase works its way through the market.

Keywords: Financial; Economics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 36
Date: 2006-09
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/273581/files/qed_wp_1105.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ags:quedwp:273581

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.273581

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Queen's Economics Department Working Papers from Queen's University - Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by AgEcon Search ().