The Incubated Revolution: Education, Cohort Effects, and the Linguistic Wage Gap in Quebec During the 20th Century

The authors note that the wage gaps between various groups within economies are common and policy solutions to attenuate them can have different distributional effects within groups. They propose a model to think about how, when labour is relatively immobile but capital isn’t, an economy with initial wage gaps between different groups can transition toward greater equality. The authors apply this framework to the French-English linguistic wage gap in Quebec between 1970 and 2000 by looking at birth cohorts from 1910 to 1970. Their findings are consistent with their model: the closing of the wage gap was caused by a provincial law in 1943 that introduced compulsory schooling in Quebec which shocked the initial equilibrium and led to cohort-specific dynamics.

Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization

Vol. 207

327-349

March 2023

en