Miana Plesca - Profile on Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Miana Plesca

Canadian Journal of Economics/Revue canadienne d'économique

Using data on immigrants from the Canadian Census, we compare immigrants who received a bachelor&... more Using data on immigrants from the Canadian Census, we compare immigrants who received a bachelor's degree from a Canadian university to immigrants who receive a bachelor's degree in their home country, in order to investigate the returns to skills acquired in Canada versus skills acquired abroad. Our measure of skill is based on postsecondary fields of study linked to the O*NET matrix of skills and competencies. We find that immigrants educated in Canada receive higher returns to their communication skills than those educated abroad. To a lesser degree, they also receive higher returns to their logical and technical skills. These gaps in skill returns explain the entirety of Canadian‐educated immigrant's 10% earnings advantage. Our results are robust to controlling for the quality of universities in the immigrant's country of study and for occupation and industry choice. The gaps are stable across time and across quantiles of the immigrant earnings distribution.

Using Big Data to Identify Meaning and Reasons for Gender Pay Gap of Local vs. Global Workforce

Proceedings - Academy of Management, Aug 1, 2022

Bias Evaluation of Professors' Reviews

2018 17th IEEE International Conference on Machine Learning and Applications (ICMLA), 2018

Typically, the overall performance of a university professor is assessed based on three criteria:... more Typically, the overall performance of a university professor is assessed based on three criteria: teaching, research and service. The teaching component is based on students' ratings and comments. However, comments and ratings are highly subjective, thus making the assessment difficult, especially given conscious and unconscious bias. RateMyProfessor.com is a popular publicly accessible website where students rate professors. We use this large corpus to evaluate bias and answer the following questions: 1) what words do students use to describe their professors? 2) is there any correlation between the words used and the rating given? and, 3) are there significant differences across gender and discipline? To answer these questions, we model the reviews using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) to automatically identify topics and we run several regression models to analyze if there are statistically significant factors that influence the overall rating.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2018

By analyzing salary data from the Ontario Sunshine List for the University Sector and combining i... more By analyzing salary data from the Ontario Sunshine List for the University Sector and combining it with productivity characteristics for research and teaching, we extend our understanding of the variables that contribute to the gender wage gap in Academia. Longitudinal analysis confirms that employees labelled as female are less represented in administration roles and full faculty positions. While the gender imbalance on the list is getting less extreme, with the proportion of women on the Sunshine List increasing from 11% in 1997 to about 40% nowadays, this increase in female representation is more likely to occur at incomes close to the access threshold of $100,000. While women do not achieve wage parity even when sorted by faculty position, within each academic rank the gender wage gap is smaller than the overall wage gap, which further confirms that, even in the ivory tower, men select into more lucrative positions than women. Controlling for productivity measures for research with h-index and for teaching with overall Rate My Professors (RMP) shows a modest effect of these productivity measures on wage formation and no effect on the wage gaps.

Has mismatch got us down? Skills and productivity in Canada

This paper uses Canadian data to examine the link between worker-job mismatch and productivity. W... more This paper uses Canadian data to examine the link between worker-job mismatch and productivity. We measure mismatch by comparing worker education to occupational skill requirements in the Labour Force Survey (LFS) merged with industrial aggregates of a labor productivity index for the period 1997Q1-2014Q1. Economy-wide mismatch shares appear to have little importance for productivity. Instead, we show that the consequences of mismatch for aggregate productivity depend on precisely which type of workers and which types of jobs are mismatched. Productivity is dampened most when university educated workers are employed in occupations generally requiring community-college or high school education, thus leaving human capital idle.

We investigate the match between the field of study of workers, given by their education, and the... more We investigate the match between the field of study of workers, given by their education, and the field of study required by the occupation in which they are employed, as described in the Career Handbook, a dictionary of occupation titles similar to O*NET. The probability of match increases with respondents’ education as well as parental education and decreases with immigrant status and English language abilities. We document returns to field of study similar to those found in the literature, even conditional on occupational skill requirements. Upon an occupation change, fields such as arts, humanities, social science, business, physical and life sciences and math and computers are all associated with increased aptitudes in the new job requirement, providing an excellent argument in favour of the transferability of skill imparted by education. JEL Classification: J24, J31, I2.

There is significant heterogeneity in the male-female wage gap depending on individualsâ€™ educat... more There is significant heterogeneity in the male-female wage gap depending on individualsâ€™ education, income, and labour supply choices. Using data from the Canadian Census and from the Labour Force Survey, we document to what extent the gap in hourly wages gets compounded by a gender gap in hours worked, making the annual gender pay gap much larger. Within fulltime full-year, full-time part year, and part-time jobs, we find much smaller gaps than the overall one, even conditional on detailed occupations. This suggests a different selection by gender into full-time and part-time jobs, with women of higher earnings potential selecting into part-time work. We document that men are more likely to be promoted than women, regardless of marital status, while women are more likely to select into part-time jobs or be absent from work if they have children in their care. Furthermore, the wage gap is very small for younger people and it increases with age, even for single individuals, providi...

Using Big Data to test labor market stability vs dynamism: what career path leads to better outcomes

Academy of Management Proceedings, 2021

The Impact of Preschool Early Childhood Education on Adult Human Capital

Very few studies have examined the long-term effects of early childhood education (ECE) on human ... more Very few studies have examined the long-term effects of early childhood education (ECE) on human capital. Our focus here is on two ECE programs: (i) Kindergarten, and (ii) Head Start a more intensive treatment for preschool children from disadvantaged backgrounds. We examine the long-term impacts of ECE on educational and labour market outcomes by comparing individuals from the 1979 NLSY who had been enrolled in an ECE program before elementary school to those individuals with no form of ECE. Using propensity-score matching techniques, we document heterogeneous impacts of ECE by gender, ethnic groups, and parental background. While mean impacts alone can appear insignificant, we find that they hide substantive effects of opposite signs across demographic groups. For instance, we find that Head Start was generally beneficial for African-American males in raising aptitude test scores and in improving high-school and post-secondary graduation outcomes, while having the opposite impact ...

Atlantic Economic Journal, 2020

Achieving an optimal esthetic result when replacing missing anterior teeth with a fixed partial d... more Achieving an optimal esthetic result when replacing missing anterior teeth with a fixed partial denture can be a challenge. This is especially true when interdisciplinary treatment is needed and the patient refuses this for personal or financial reasons. Here we report a clinical case where a fixed partial denture was used to change the incisor relationship and to restore the normal tooth and gingival tissue shape, morphology, and relationship by including artificial gingiva within the fixed partial denture when the patient refused lengthy and costly multispecialty treatment options.

Canadian Journal of Economics/Revue canadienne d'économique, 2020

The literature on the returns to training has pointed out that, immediately following a training ... more The literature on the returns to training has pointed out that, immediately following a training episode, wages of participants in employer-sponsored training increase substantially while wages of participants in government-sponsored training hardly change. We argue that a clear selection issue has been overlooked by the literature -most of the government-sponsored trainees are occupation switchers while most participants in employer-sponsored training are occupation stayers. An occupational switch involves a substantial destruction of human capital, and once we account for the associated decline in wages we find a large positive impact of both employer-and government-sponsored training on workers' human capital.

Definitions Matter! When Big Data Takes on Biased Theory Building in International HRM Research

Academy of Management Proceedings, 2019

Analyzing the Gender Wage Gap in Ontario's Public Sector

2015 IEEE 14th International Conference on Machine Learning and Applications (ICMLA), 2015

In this paper, we analyze the gender wage gap in Ontario?s public sector. Our analysis is based o... more In this paper, we analyze the gender wage gap in Ontario?s public sector. Our analysis is based on the salaries of high earners in the public sector. Although these salaries are publicly available from Ontario?s Sunshine List, a key attribute is missing from the public data, the gender variable. We propose a 2-stage model to predict the gender based on the person?s first name, and we augment the data with the new variable. With the new database created, we analyze, present and discuss results for the gender wage gap in Ontario. The findings of this research are being used by Ontario?s provincial government to reassess and change current policies for pay equity.

Evaluating multi-treatment programs

Abstract This paper considers the evaluation of programs,that offer multiple treatmentstotheirpar... more Abstract This paper considers the evaluation of programs,that offer multiple treatmentstotheirparticipants.Ourtheoreticaldiscussionoutlinesthetradeoffs associated with evaluating the program,as a whole versus separately evaluating the various individual treatments. Our empirical analysis considers the value of disaggregating multi-treatment programs,using data from the U.S. National Job Training Partnership Act Study. This study includes both experimental data, which serve as a benchmark, and non-experimental data. The JTPA experi- ment divides the program,into three treatment,“streams” centered on different services.Unlikepreviousworkthatanalyzestheprogramasawhole,weanalyze the streams separately. Despite our relatively small sample sizes, our findings illustrate the potential for valuable insights into program,operation and impact to get lost when aggregating treatments. In addition, we show that many of the lessons drawn,from analyzing JTPA as a single treatment,carry over to the...

Training and Human Capital

ABSTRACT The rapidly growing literature studying the returns to firm- and government-sponsored tr... more ABSTRACT The rapidly growing literature studying the returns to firm- and government-sponsored training has made a striking observation. Returns to firm-sponsored training are positive and large while returns to government-sponsored training are low or even negative, especially in the short run. This has sparked considerable research interest in studying why government-sponsored training is so ineffective. In this paper we re-evaluate the motivating evidence. We show that there is a clear selection issue overlooked by the existing literature. In particular, a large fraction of the participants in government-sponsored training are occupation switchers, while most of the participants in firm-sponsored training are occupation stayers. Since a switch of an occupation involves a substantial destruction of human capital, the associated decline in wages needs to be accounted for. Once we do this, we find large positive impact of training on workers' human capital. The magnitude of this effect is similar for training sponsored by the firm and the government.

This paper provides a general equilibrium evaluation of the Employment Service, also known as the... more This paper provides a general equilibrium evaluation of the Employment Service, also known as the Public Labor Exchange (PLX), a national program which facilitates meetings between job seekers and vacancies. The paper departs from the partial equilibrium framework of previous evaluations by constructing a dynamic general equilibrium matching model with the PLX as one search channel, and the other search channel comprising all other search methods. The PLX is a directed search channel in the sense that searchers are matched by skill levels. The model is calibrated to the U.S. PLX and to the U.S. labor market and is used to compute general and partial equilibrium impacts of the PLX. The findings are that (i) the partial equilibrium impacts are consistent with the empirical literature, but different from the general equilibrium ones; (ii) the standard assumption in the evaluation literature, that outcomes for agents who do not participate in a program are not directly affected by the program, does not hold for the PLX; (iii) the heterogeneity across and within worker skill levels plays an important role when computing aggregate impacts; and, (iv) equilibrium adjustments are driven by employers who post more high-skill vacancies when both search channels operate.

The rapidly growing literature studying the returns to firm-and governmentsponsored training has ... more The rapidly growing literature studying the returns to firm-and governmentsponsored training has made a striking observation. Returns to firm-sponsored training are positive and large while returns to government-sponsored training are low or even negative. This has sparked considerable research interest in studying why government-sponsored training is so inefficient. In this paper we re-evaluate the motivating evidence. We show that there is a clear selection issue overlooked by the existing literature. In particular, a large fraction of the participants in governmentsponsored training are occupation switchers, while most of the participants in firmsponsored training are occupation stayers. Since a switch of an occupation involves a substantial destruction of human capital, the associated decline in wages needs to be accounted for. Once we do this, the returns to firm-and government-sponsored training look quite similar.

Journal of Population Economics, 2014

We combine the New Immigrant Survey (NIS), which contains information on US legal immigrants, wit... more We combine the New Immigrant Survey (NIS), which contains information on US legal immigrants, with the American Community Survey (ACS), which contains information on legal and illegal immigrants to the U.S. Using econometric methodology proposed by Lancaster and Imbens (1996) we compute the probability for each observation in the ACS data to refer to an illegal immigrant, conditional on observed characteristics. The results for illegal versus legal immigrants are novel, since no other work has quantified the characteristics of illegal immigrants from a random sample. We find that, compared to legal immigrants, illegal immigrants are more likely to be less educated, males, and married with their spouse not present. These results are heterogeneous across education categories, country of origin (Mexico) and whether professional occupations are included or not in the analysis. Forecasts for the distribution of legal and illegal characteristics match aggregate imputations by the Department of Homeland Security. We find that, while illegal immigrants suffer a wage penalty compared to legal immigrants, returns to higher education remain large and positive.

Journal of Human Capital, 2010

Copyright belongs to the author. Small sections of the text, not exceeding three paragraphs, can ... more Copyright belongs to the author. Small sections of the text, not exceeding three paragraphs, can be used provided proper acknowledgement is given. The Rimini Centre for Economic Analysis (RCEA) was established in March 2007. RCEA is a private, nonprofit organization dedicated to independent research in Applied and Theoretical Economics and related fields. RCEA organizes seminars and workshops, sponsors a general interest journal The Review of Economic Analysis, and organizes a biennial conference: The Rimini Conference in Economics and Finance (RCEF). The RCEA has a Canadian branch: The Rimini Centre for Economic Analysis in Canada (RCEA-Canada). Scientific work contributed by the RCEA Scholars is published in the RCEA Working Papers and Professional Report series. The views expressed in this paper are those of the authors. No responsibility for them should be attributed to the Rimini Centre for Economic Analysis.