Nicole Fortin's research focus revolves around three main themes:
"Foreign Human Capital and the Earnings Gap between Immigrants and Canadian-born Workers" (2016) Nicole Fortin,
Thomas Lemieux and Javier Torres use new information regarding the location of the
immigrant study available in the 2006
Canadian Census to estimate the returns to Canadian and foreign
human capital. They find that controlling the source of human capital (Canadian vs. foreign) explains a large part of the wage gap between immigrants and
natives. They also demonstrate that the commonly used imputation procedures (e.g. Friedberg, 2000) that allocate national and foreign education according to age at arrival is more likely to overestimate the returns to foreign education and underestimate the returns to foreign work experience. They also argue that the wage gap between immigrants and natives is very heterogeneous across all places of birth, even after including the location fixed effects, although this inclusion significantly reduces the negative effects of the country of origin in countries such as
China,
Pakistan and
India. The authors also observe a substantial
heterogeneity in the mobility of human capital.
"Labor Market Institutions and the Distribution of Wages, 1973-1992: A Semiparametric Approach" (1996) John DiNardo,
Thomas Lemieux and Nicole Fortin employ the
semiparametric regression approach to analyse the impacts of various institutional changes and labour market factors on wage distribution. The procedure provides a visually clear representation of where in the density of wages these various factors exert the greatest impact. Using data from the
Current Population Survey (CPS), they find similar results as in previous research. De-unionization and supply and demand shocks were key factors to account for the increasing wage inequality from 1979 to 1988. Moreover, they find that a decline in the real value of the minimum wage during the 1980s contributes to a massive proportion of a wider
gender pay gap despite a nominal rise in the minimum wage, where the effect is found to be more significant among women.
Research on economic progress of women, gender equality and gender issues in education "Computer Gaming and the Gender Math Gap: Cross-Country Evidence among Teenagers" (2018) Fortin co-authored this research with
Yann Algan. They employ the
Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) surveys to determine whether the gender gap in math test scores correlates with computer (digital devices) gaming. Using a decomposition based on a pooled hybrid specification, they find that 13% to 29% of the gender math gap exists due to gender differences in the incidence and returns to intense gaming. They argue that there is a potential role for gaming network effects as they compare and contrast the negative and positive girl-specific effects found for collaborative games and single-player games.
"Leaving Boys Behind: Gender Disparities in High Academic Achievement" (2015) Fortin,
Philip Oreopoulos, and
Shelley Phipps employ three decades of data from the "Monitoring the Future" cross-sectional surveys to show that the mode of girls' high school
GPA distribution has shifted from "B" to "A" from the 1980s to the 2000s. This essentially leave boys behind as the mode of boys' GPA distribution remains the same at "B". In a reweighted OB decomposition of achievement at each GPA level, they find that gender differences in
tertiary education expectations, controlling for school ability, and as early as 8th grade are the most crucial factor to account for this trend. They find that the growing population of girls aiming for a postgraduate degree are adequate to explain the rise in the proportion of girls obtaining "A's" over time. The relatively greater share of boys receiving "C" and "C+" can be accounted for by a more frequent misbehaviour at school, as well as a greater portion of boys only aiming to finish a two-year college degree.
Research on decomposition methods "Decomposing Wage Distributions using Recentered Influence Function Regressions" (2018) Nicole Fortin co-authored with
Sergio Firpo and
Thomas Lemieux to explain an extension of the
Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition method that can be applied to various distributional measures. First of all, it requires the division of distributional changes into a wage structure effect and a composition effect using a reweighting method. Second of all, it requires the further division of the two components into the contribution of each explanatory variable using
recentered influence function (RIF) regressions. They demonstrate the practical aspects of the procedure by exploring how factors, such as de-unionization,
education,
occupations, and industry changes, impacted the polarization of U.S. male wages from the late 1980s to the mid 2010s.
"Decomposition Methods" (2010) This chapter, authored by
Thomas Lemieux,
Sergio Firpo and Nicole Fortin, provides an overview of decomposition methods that have been developed after the seminal work of Oaxaca and Blinder in the early 1970s. These methods could be applied to decompose the divergence in a distributional statistic between two groups, or its change over time, into various explanatory factors. While the original work of Oaxaca and Blinder considered the case of the mean, their main focus is placed on other distributional statistics aside the mean (e.g.
quantiles, the
Gini coefficient or the
variance). They also discuss the assumptions required in order to identify the various decomposition elements, different estimation methods are also proposed in the chapter. The authors also demonstrate how these methods work practically by discussing existing applications and working through a set of empirical examples. == Research grants and awards ==