Who is succeeding in the Canadian labour market? Predictors of career success for skilled immigrants

This article’s approach to specific-skill match differs from Boudarbat and Chernoff’s in two major ways: it uses a different data source and it relates the match to a labour market outcome-earnings. This study is based on data from the 2006 Survey of Labour and Income Dynamics (SLID). In SLID, respondents who worked in 2006 were asked: œHow closely was this job related to your education? Similar to FOG, three types of responses were possible: closely related, somewhat related and not at all related. Making use of this job- education matching indicator and the rich earnings information in SLID, this article examines whether there is a wage differential between prime-age workers whose job is closely related to their education and those not as well matched (see Data source and definitions). The study begins with an overview of the matching indicator by various individual characteristics and presents the mean wages for individuals at each of the three levels of matching for these characteristics. The descriptive statistics indicate that a variety of characteristics affect match rates and that the wage effects vary by gender and level of education. Thus, the second section of the paper constructs models that incorporate these features to provide bounded estimates of the wage premium for a good job-education match.