Immigrant integration is a central issue in policy debates, with wage assimilation serving as a key indicator of immigrants' economic success. Using matched employer–employee data from Canada, we study how access to higher-paying firms affects the economic assimilation of immigrants. Immigrants are disproportionately concentrated in lower-paying firms, accounting for much of the observed inequality. Nearly half of this sorting occurs across industries, and both firm- and industry-level wage gaps stagnate after eight years, suggesting that further assimilation reflects human capital accumulation rather than improved firm access. Importantly, these disparities persist after controlling for estimates of worker skill, indicating barriers to high-paying firms rather than differences in human capital. The analysis further shows that Canada’s post-2015 immigration policy reforms significantly improved immigrant outcomes: the initial wage gap narrowed by 25–35%, with roughly half of the improvement attributable to better allocation into higher-paying firms. Taken together, the findings highlight the critical role of firm sorting and its interaction with immigration policy in shaping the economic integration of immigrants. 

A standard theory of non-compete agreements (NCAs) is that they encourage firm-sponsored investment in workers by reducing turnover, which may benefit both parties if productivity gains are shared with workers. While this view may justify NCA use among high-skilled workers, the prevalence of NCAs in low-wage labor markets is harder to reconcile: these jobs typically involve less general raining and workers are more easily replaced. We present two competing explanations. One is an efficient contracting view, in which workers with high discount rates accept NCAs in exchange for upfront compensation, even in the absence of firm sponsored investment. The other emphasizes monopsony power, where firms use NCAs to restrict job mobility and further suppress wages when they cannot price discriminate. Using detailed worker-level data from the NLSY97 and a stacked difference-in-differences design that exploits variation across cohorts of NCA signers, we analyze how signing an NCA affects job satisfaction, wages at the time of signing, and job tasks. We use these empirical results to distinguish between the two theories. 

I study how barriers to labor market integration shape immigrant outcomes and the aggregate economy. Using matched employer–employee data from Canada, I document new and detailed  differences between immigrants and natives in terms of earnings, labor market dynamics, and sorting patterns across firms. Guided by these facts, I develop and estimate a search model with two-sided heterogeneity, sorting, referral networks, and immigrant assimilation. A quarter of the gap in earnings and half of the gap in firm sorting is driven by allocational barriers--a combination of lower effective job search, higher job instability, and segmented referral networks--rather than differences in human capital. Eliminating these barriers would raise immigrant output by 8.4% and total output by 1.1% by increasing immigrant employment and allowing them to reallocate into higher productivity firms. Feasible integration programs that combine human capital investments with search assistance deliver similar output gains. These gains are achieved without harming native workers due to firms' endogenous job-creation response. The counterfactuals highlight that integration programs should target unemployed low-skill immigrants.

Firms react to changes in factor prices with intensive and extensive-margin employment adjustments at the occupational-level. We study the distributional and aggregate consequences of this make-or-buy dynamic by developing a novel network model of heterogeneous firm-to-firm trade where the boundary of each firm depends on factor prices and firm-occupation comparative advantage in input-production. We show that the model can be aggregated and taken to industry-level data, and use the calibrated model to examine recent trends in employment, wages and trade in the US. Using public ACS data, we provide empirical evidence that a significant fraction of the growth in wage inequality in the US is due to changes in firm/industry specialization and occupational sorting. To understand and measure the underlying causes of these trends, we calibrate the model to occupation and industry data from the ACS and input-output tables. Our model allows us to decompose the rise in wage variation into a) changes in inter-industry trade frictions, b) changes in production technology and c) changes in labor supply. We show that changes in trade frictions have substantial implications for wage inequality and the increases in occupational sorting and concentration.

I develop a theoretically founded empirical strategy to estimate how firms adjust their wage setting policies in response to immigration inflows. As in traditional models, my framework predicts that hiring new immigrants will tend to directly reduce the productivity of existing workers at a firm, putting downward pressure on wages (direct channel). However, this direct effect is offset at the firm level by two competing forces: (i) existing workers may respond by re-allocating away to less exposed firms (worker mobility channel) and (ii) firms respond by adjusting demand for other inputs (input complementarity channel). The impact of immigrants on the labor market therefore depends critically on which firms attract new immigrant labor and the technology those firms operate. I further allow for the fact that immigration may affect firm wages via both changes to marginal product of labor and/or changes to their labor supply curve and decompose these distinct margins of adjustment. I apply my framework to Canadian matched employer-employee data to quantify the mechanisms through which firms adjust to immigrant inflows. 

Immigrants tend to have substantially worse labour market outcomes than Canadian-born workers. This paper provides an overview of immigrants in the Canadian labour market, describing the key barriers that can arise when changing cultures and labour markets and that can hinder immigrants from realizing their economic potential. It then summarizes the efforts Canada has made to alleviate these barriers and highlights some persistent challenges going forward, such as the current state of foreign credential recognition (FCR) and cautioning against the rise of the two-step immigration scheme. Finally, it offers some insights for future policy, such as a more rigorous evaluation of Canada’s Settlement Program, decreasing the disconnect between federal admission decisions and the perceptions of new immigrants by firms and regulatory bodies, and optimizing the points system.