Analysis

This report explores the size and nature of the attrition challenges faced by the Longitudinal and International Study of Adults (LISA) survey, as well as the use of a non-response weight adjustment and calibration strategy to mitigate the effects of attrition on the LISA estimates. The study focuses on data from waves 1 (2012) to 4 (2018) and uses practical examples based on selected demographic variables, to illustrate how attrition be assessed and treated.

This infographic presents differences in the caregiving arrangements of Canadians, as captured in Wave 4 (2018) of the Longitudinal and International Study of Adults. Among individuals who acted as caregivers between January 2016 and December 2017, some had provided care each month over the two-year period, while others had provided care for a continuous but shorter period of time, or on and off over the period considered. Moreover, individuals in different arrangements varied in their characteristics and in the intensity of the care they had provided.

Using data from the Longitudinal and International Study of Adults, this infographic shows the relationship between the income of adult Canadians and the income of their parents when they were growing up. Additionally, it highlights that families with higher incomes were also families where parents were more highly educated, while families with lower incomes were more likely to have a non-official language as their mother tongue or to be lone-parent families.

Administrative data sets have become increasingly popular sources of information to study mobility across generations. However, the inclusion of parent-child pairs depends on the primary purpose for which the data was collected. In the case of tax records, both parents and children must have worked and filed their taxes, and the children's labour market entry must have happened before they left the parental home. This paper documents selection in samples of parent-child pairs constructed from personal income tax records from Canada, and discusses implications for intergenerational research. It takes advantage of the fact that Statistics Canada's Longitudinal and International Study of Adults (LISA) includes both survey and administrative data to inform the nature and severity of the resulting sample selection. Results show that respondents who were successfully linked to their parents are more educated, and are more likely to have grown up in better educated, nuclear families. However, correcting for sample selection suggests that there is no bias in unadjusted estimates.

This study investigates the suitability of Canada's Longitudinal and International Study of Adults (LISA) for research on intergenerational income mobility. The LISA combines survey data, collected biennially since 2012, and the personal income tax records of both respondents and their past and present family members. In comparison, existing work on intergenerational mobility in Canada has often used the Intergenerational Income Database (IID), a purely administrative dataset based on the universe of tax filers. The IID's size has allowed researchers to describe the experience of mobility of narrowly defined geographic units and cohorts. However, its potential to investigate the mechanisms underlying these patterns is limited, given the small set of variables it informs. As such, the LISA is a promising candidate to further our understanding of the drivers of mobility. This study reproduces the analysis from four key papers that have documented the intergenerational transmission of income in Canada using the IID. Despite having a much smaller sample size and a different approach to the establishment of parent-child links, it finds that the LISA produces results that are consistent with the existing literature. This study also explores the sensitivity of rank-rank estimates to the choice of different specification and present results that will guide the methodological choices to be made by users of the LISA intergenerational family files in combination with LISA variables from the survey data.

This infographic presents differences in the caregiving arrangements of Canadians, as captured in Wave 4 (2018) of the Longitudinal and International Study of Adults. Among individuals who acted as caregivers between January 2016 and December 2017, some had provided care each month over the two-year period, while others had provided care for a continuous but shorter period of time, or on and off over the period considered. Moreover, individuals in different arrangements varied in their characteristics and in the intensity of the care they had provided.

Using data from the Longitudinal and International Study of Adults, this infographic shows the relationship between the income of adult Canadians and the income of their parents when they were growing up. Additionally, it highlights that families with higher incomes were also families where parents were more highly educated, while families with lower incomes were more likely to have a non-official language as their mother tongue or to be lone-parent families.

This report explores the size and nature of the attrition challenges faced by the Longitudinal and International Study of Adults (LISA) survey, as well as the use of a non-response weight adjustment and calibration strategy to mitigate the effects of attrition on the LISA estimates. The study focuses on data from waves 1 (2012) to 4 (2018) and uses practical examples based on selected demographic variables, to illustrate how attrition be assessed and treated.

Administrative data sets have become increasingly popular sources of information to study mobility across generations. However, the inclusion of parent-child pairs depends on the primary purpose for which the data was collected. In the case of tax records, both parents and children must have worked and filed their taxes, and the children's labour market entry must have happened before they left the parental home. This paper documents selection in samples of parent-child pairs constructed from personal income tax records from Canada, and discusses implications for intergenerational research. It takes advantage of the fact that Statistics Canada's Longitudinal and International Study of Adults (LISA) includes both survey and administrative data to inform the nature and severity of the resulting sample selection. Results show that respondents who were successfully linked to their parents are more educated, and are more likely to have grown up in better educated, nuclear families. However, correcting for sample selection suggests that there is no bias in unadjusted estimates.

This study investigates the suitability of Canada's Longitudinal and International Study of Adults (LISA) for research on intergenerational income mobility. The LISA combines survey data, collected biennially since 2012, and the personal income tax records of both respondents and their past and present family members. In comparison, existing work on intergenerational mobility in Canada has often used the Intergenerational Income Database (IID), a purely administrative dataset based on the universe of tax filers. The IID's size has allowed researchers to describe the experience of mobility of narrowly defined geographic units and cohorts. However, its potential to investigate the mechanisms underlying these patterns is limited, given the small set of variables it informs. As such, the LISA is a promising candidate to further our understanding of the drivers of mobility. This study reproduces the analysis from four key papers that have documented the intergenerational transmission of income in Canada using the IID. Despite having a much smaller sample size and a different approach to the establishment of parent-child links, it finds that the LISA produces results that are consistent with the existing literature. This study also explores the sensitivity of rank-rank estimates to the choice of different specification and present results that will guide the methodological choices to be made by users of the LISA intergenerational family files in combination with LISA variables from the survey data.