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Table 1 Moments and parameters for single mothers without completed postsecondary education

From: Evaluating search and matching models using experimental data

 

British Columbia

New Brunswick

Income Assistance benefits, monthly (b a )1

927

737

Unemployment benefits, monthly (b u )2

952

695

UI qualifying months 3

  

Minimum

4

3

Maximum

9

8

UI benefit months

  

Minimum (\(\underline {u}\))

5

7

Maximum (\(\bar {u}\))

10

12

Average job tenure, months (1/δ)4

46.68

47.28

Average hourly wage 4

10.65

7.78

Average wage, tenure > 48 months

11.12

8.22

Wage growth equation w(t)=

7.89+0.0891t

6.04+0.0418t

 

−0.000378t 2

−0.0000736t 2

 

+6.10×10−7 t 3

+5.51×10−8 t 3

Minimum wage \((\underline {w})^{5}\)

5.50

5.00

Vacancy rate (V/F)6

3.20

3.20

Exogenous job separation rate (δ)7

0.0214

0.0211

Monthly discount factor (β)8

0.9835

0.9835

Elasticity of search costs w.r.t effort (z)9

1.8457

1.8457

  1. Notes: All values are in 1992 Canadian dollars. 1. National Council of Welfare (2002). 2. Unemployment benefits are based on 55 per cent of average monthly earnings from the Labour Force Survey (1997–2000). 3. Information on EI eligibility rules is from Lin et al. (1998). 4. Labour Force Survey (1997–2000). 5. Minimum wage at the beginning of the the SSP experiment (Michalopoulos et al. 2002). 6. Galarneau et al. (2001), based on the average for retail trade and consumer services and labor-intensive tertiary manufacturing sectors. 7. Inverse of average job tenure in the Labour Force Survey (1997–2000). 8. This corresponds to an annual discount factor of 0.82, the factor used for all figures and tables in Davidson and Woodbury (1993). 9. From Christensen et al. (2005)