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We investigate differences in labour market transition rates between high and low minimum wage regimes using Canadian data spanning 1979-2008. We find that higher minimum wages result in lower hiring rates but also lower job separation rates. Importantly, the reduced separation rates are due mainly to reductions in layoffs, occur in the first six months of a job and are present for unskilled workers of all ages. Thus, jobs in higher minimum wage regimes are more stable but harder to get. For older workers, these effects are almost exactly offsetting, resulting in little impact on the employment rate.A voluminous literature exists on the impacts of minimum wages on the labour market. This literature can be seen as having two overlapping goals. The first is to use a purportedly exogenous shift in the price of a key factor to better understand the demand for labour and production decisions more generally. The second is to consider the usefulness of minimum wages as a policy tool. Almost the entire existing empirical literature on minimum wages examines the comparative static effect of a minimum wage change on employment levels and/or the shape of the wage distribution. 1 In this article, we investigate the underlying question: how do labour market transition rates (quits, layoffs and hires) differ in low versus high minimum wage regimes? Answering this question provides a different set of insights on minimum wages as a policy tool and a new set of facts that sharpen our understanding of the functioning of the labour market.Recent studies of employment impacts of minimum wages take one of two main approaches. The first is to compare employment levels or rates across jurisdictions with different minimum wages using panel data at the jurisdiction level (Baker, et al. (1999) for Canada; Neumark and Wascher (2007) and the many articles cited therein for the US). The second is to use individual level panel data to examine the impact of an increase in the minimum wage from m t at time t to m tþ1 at time t + 1. In particular, these latter articles examine the employment rate in t + 1 for workers whose wage lies between m t and m tþ1 in period t (the group of workers most directly affected by the minimum wage increase). The minimum wage effect is identified by comparing employment changes for the directly affected workers with those for workers in other jurisdictions and at other points in the wage distribution (Currie and Fallick (1996) and Neumark et al. (2004) for the US; Yuen (2003) and Campolieti et al. (2005) for Canada). Both types of studies tend to find small (negative or positive) effects on

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Isodicentric chromosomes are the most commonly reported aberrations of the human Y chromosome. As they are unstable during cell division and can generate various types of cell lines, most reported patients are chromosomal mosaics, generally including a 45,X cell line. Phenotypes depend on the location of the breakpoints as well as on the proportion of each cell line and vary from male to abnormal female or individual with ambiguous genitalia. Although phenotypic variability is known to also depend on the degree of mosaicism in the various tissues, gonads are rarely studied. We report nine cases of isodicentric Y chromosomes studied by conventional and molecular cytogenetic: three males, five females, and one individual with sexual ambiguity. Two males had a non-mosaic karyotype, while the third male was a mosaic with a predominant 46,XY cell line. Three of the females had a major 45,X cell line, while the last two females and the patient with ambiguous genitalia had a major 46,X,idic(Y) cell line. Analyses of gonadal tissues from the individual with sexual ambiguity and of three of the five female patients gave results concordant with their phenotype, allowing us to better understand the sexual differentiation of these patients.