Alumni Newsletter September 2013
Introducing the CIBC Centre for Human Capfital & Productivity
Nearly 15 years ago, the CIBC Centre began as a five-year project funded by a generous donation from the CIBC. A second donation in 2004 founded the Centre with a broad mandate to study issues related to human capital, skills, and productivity.
Today, 16 economists at Western are affiliated with the CIBC Centre, working in such diverse areas as labour economics, public economics, development economics, macroeconomics, and industrial organization. It is no exaggeration to say that the CIBC Centre is truly a world-class collection of researchers studying issues related to human capital and productivity.
As part of its outreach and dissemination efforts, the Centre distributes regular policy briefs ranging in topic from international comparisons of lifetime earnings inequality to student loan repayment issues to the impacts of education on crime, health, and civic participation. Let us know if you would like to receive the briefs, or check them out on the Centre’s website.
Due to the innovative and policy-relevant nature of this research and new efforts at dissemination, the Centre is seeing more regular discussions of its work in the national and international media. You might have heard Chris Robinson on CBC Radio Canada International discussing his research on the transferability of skills or you might have read about Todd Stinebrickner’s recent study on post-secondary dropout in the Globe and Mail. Todd’s most recent research on high attrition in math and science majors has also generated a lot of buzz on blogs run by The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg News, and Slate.
The Centre regularly sponsors conferences on issues central to labour markets, skill development, and financing human capital investment. Most recently, the Conference on Tasks, Skills and Human Capital covered new theories and evidence on the development of multiple skills and their transferability across jobs. The Centre also recently co-sponsored the Conference on Financing Human Capital Investment with the University of Chicago’s Becker-Friedman Institute and the Institute for New Economic Thinking. Plans are currently in the works for a conference on measuring heterogeneity in firm productivity and its economic importance.
The Centre has also helped lay the groundwork for research to come, aiding in the design and collection of major survey initiatives in Canada and the U.S., including Statistics Canada’s new Adult and Family Longitudinal Platform, the Canada Student Loans Program Client Satisfaction Surveys, and the Berea Panel Study.
Most recently, members of the Centre helped secure a new $200,000 SSHRC Partnership Development Grant entitled “Building a Network to Study Productivity in Canada from a Firm-Level Perspective”. This partnership between Industry Canada, Statistics Canada, and researchers around Canada is exploring new opportunities to analyze largely unexplored firm-level data in Canada to shed light on issues ranging from firm productivity to innovation to international trade.
If you are interested in learning more about the forefront of research and policy in the areas of skills, human capital, and productivity, please check out the Centre’s website or send an email to cibc@uwo.ca.
Lance Lochner
Director, CIBC Centre for Human Capital & Productivity
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