Topic List:
1. Federal child benefits (CCTB, WIS, NCBS)
2. Registered Retirement Savings Plan (RRSP) net contributions
3. Elected split pension amount and deduction for elected split-pension amount
4. Registered Pension Plan (RPP) contributions
5. Private retirement pension income
6. Universal child care tax benefit
7. Canada & Quebec Pension Plan (C/QPP) contributions
8. Canada & Quebec Pension Plan (C/QPP) benefits
9. Employment Insurance (EI) contributions
10. Employment Insurance (EI) benefits
11. Old Age Security (OAS) pension income
12. Social Assistance income
13. Workers compensation benefits
14. Public health insurance premiums
15. Other topics approved by instructor
The data for these topics appear in the Survey of Labour and Income Dynamics (SLID), except for the RRSP net contributions which appear in the Survey of Household Spending (SHS). To learn more about these data sets and methodology, see these websites:
SLID http://www23.statcan.gc.ca/imdb/p2SV.pl?Function=getSurvey&SDDS=3889
SHS http://www23.statcan.gc.ca/imdb/p2SV.pl?Function=getSurvey&SDDS=3508
To access these data, you can use the UT/DLS Microdata Analysis and Subsetting with SDA at CHASS, available through the University of Toronto Library. You will need to log in using your student account information.
Instructions to access data and example using the federal child benefit variable:
1. Log in to access the data here: http://sda.chass.utoronto.ca/sdaweb/sda.htm
2. Locate the relevant survey (in most cases, the SLID) from the list of Canadian microdata files
3. Choose the person file from the most recent year, and click the Data link (in the SHS, the unit of observation is the household so simply click the Data link for the most recent year)
4. If, at this point, you are prompted that Access restricted only to the subscribers then you will need to click on the University of Toronto, Toronto link and log in using your student information, then repeat Steps 1-3)
At this point, you are logged into the SDA interface, which will permit you to access the public-use micro data files. To find out what variables you need:
1. From the top navigation bar, select Codebooks and then SDA Codebooks
2. Choose Alphabetical Variable List from the left navigation bar
At this point, you should see a List of Items in Alphabetical Order of the complete list of variables that are available in the SLID or SHS. Take note of the variable names of interest. For example, the federal child benefits variable is named chfed42. You may also want to take note of the names for the demographic variables of interest to you, such as age, sex, or marital status. With this information recorded, you can now return to the previous screen.
To download the microdata:
1. Choose Download and then Customized Subset
2. Select the CSV file (Comma Separated Values with header record) option
3. In the text box labelled Enter names of individual variables (original or created) to include, enter the variable names of interest to you
4. Click Continue at the bottom
5. Click Create the Files after ensuring that the information on this page is correct
6. Right-click the Data file link and save to an appropriate location on your computer by choosing the Save link as option
7. You may also wish to download the Codebook file in the same manner, which is a simple text file that describes the variables you chose in more detail
Finally, open the program in Microsoft Excel or other spreadsheet program. Your variables should appear, along with a CASEID variable that can be ignored (this simply represents a person indicator random number and is of no significance here). For example, suppose you were interested in plotting the federal child benefits for individuals with wage/salary income between $0 and $200,000. To do so:
1. Download the variables wgsal42 and chfed42 from the SLID
2. Sort by income (wgsal42) from smallest to largest, expanding the selection
3. Select the columns for these variables over the relevant income range, and produce the following scatter plot:
This graph shows several things. First, the amount of child tax benefit is a decreasing function of income, on average. Second, there is significant variation in the amount claimed especially at low income amounts. Third, despite the fact that some individuals appear to claim large amounts of
benefits at low income levels, the estimated average benefit for zero income is $341 as evidenced by the fitted regression equation. How might things look if you compared across age groups, education groups, sex, family size, province, married/single, or any other descriptive variable that is interesting for your topic?