Research
Published and Accepted Papers
Spillovers from Government Policy During a Crisis: Evidence from International Trade During COVID-19 Lockdowns (with Brandon Malloy), Review of International Economics 2023. 1-32 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/roie.12722
We examine how variation in the severity of government intervention in response to the COVID-19 pandemic impacted trade, using a novel dataset on monthly bilateral trade flows between Canadian provinces and U.S. states. Our results show that differences in the collections of policy responses employed by states and provinces throughout the course of the pandemic have had a significant and heterogeneous impact in accounting for variation in changes in aggregate province-state trade flows. Government interventions around workplace closures, domestic travel restrictions and stay at home orders are associated with the largest drop in bilaterial trade flows, especially when introduced by U.S. states and during periods when COVID-19 case rates are rising, while many pandemic restrictions have no statistically significant impact on trade flows.
Immigrants and Exports: Firm-level Evidence from Canada (with Ananth Ramanarayanan), Canadian Journal of Economics 2022. 55:1250-1293 https://doi.org/10.1111/caje.12608. working paper version
Firms face considerable informational barriers to engaging in international trade. Immigrants can play a key role in overcoming these barriers by acting as intermediaries between firms in their home and host countries, thus facilitating trade. Previous studies have shown that this trade-creation effect of immigrants is significant at the aggregate level: e.g. Portuguese immigrants to Canada raises Canada's exports to Portugal. In this paper, we examine the trade-creation effect of immigrants at the firm level: how much Portuguese immigrants employed by Canadian firms increase those firms' exports to Portugal. We use a unique administrative matched employer-employee dataset containing Canadian manufacturing firms' export transactions and employees' immigration data to estimate how much immigrant employees reduces a firm's costs of exporting to their home countries.
Media Coverage: Export Development Canada
The Impact of the First Wave of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Trade between Canada and the United States (with Brandon Malloy), Canadian Public Policy 2021 47:4, 554-572 https://doi.org/10.3138/cpp.2021-028. working paper version
We examine how the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted trade between Canada and the U.S., using a novel dataset on monthly bilateral trade flows between Canadian provinces and U.S. states, merged with COVID-19 health data. We find a statistically significant and robust negative relationship between the severity of COVID-19 and changes in Canadian exports and imports. Our results show that a one-standard deviation rise in COVID-19 severity in a Canadian province leads to a fall of 3.1-4.9% in exports and a 6.7-9.1% fall in imports. This result is robust to the measure of COVID-19 severity used: cases levels, hospitalizations, or deaths. We also investigate the role of COVID-19 policy responses and find that lockdown stringency measures did not significantly affect Canadian export or import flows. Decomposing our analysis by industry, we determine that trade in the relatively more labour-intensive manufacturing industry was most negatively affected by the pandemic, while the agriculture industry suffered the least disruption to trade flows. Collectively our results suggest that while trade was most adversely affected in industries and regions hardest hit by the pandemic, government-imposed lockdown restrictions do not appear to have caused significant additional decreases in Canadian exports or imports.
The Welfare Impact of Immigration with Endogenous Cross-Border Migration: An Application to the European Union, Economic Modelling. 2020.93:205-216. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.econmod.2020.08.004. working paper version
In this paper, I examine the welfare impact of migration in a general equilibrium model with endogenous worker location choice. My framework incorporates labor productivity differences across countries, worker heterogeneity in productivity across skill and nativity types, as well as country-pair specific costs of migration. In a series of experiments, I predict the migration response of workers to an expansion or contraction in the number of European Union (EU) member countries. For the case of the United Kingdom (U.K.) leaving the EU, commonly referred to as Brexit, low skilled native-born U.K. workers suffer a drop-in income, whereas high skilled workers experience an increase. This result is driven, in part, by an increase in high skilled immigration to the U.K. from outside the EU, which helps to dampen the loss in income of low skilled workers.
Job Changing and internal mobility: Insights into the "declining duo" from Canadian administrative data (with Michael Haan ), Population, Space and Place. 2020.26(5):e2324. https://doi.org/10.1002/psp.2324
In this paper we look at what is perhaps the most obvious explanation for a secular decline in internal migration in recent decades, yet one that few researchers have been able to examine: declining economic returns to geographical mobility. We use the Canadian Employer-Employee Dynamics Database (CEEDD), a linked firm-family-individual tax file, to look at the 1- and 5-year economic returns for movers that relocated in 1997, 2002, and 2007. We compare these returns to non-movers, and find that “mover’s premium” has actually increased over time, but that this increase stems from a one-time bump that occurs at time of move, rather than through a long-term shift in earnings trajectories.
Working Papers
The Demographic Determinants of Household Inequality: Evidence from Canadian Administrative Data (with Michael Haan), revise and resubmit at Canadian Studies in Population
We examine how inequality in Canada has evolved over a 23-year period (1991 to 2013) using unique administrative tax data and gain new insights on the drivers of inequality using a Recentered Influence Function regression approach. We find that 25 percent of the increase in earnings inequality can be attributed to changes in demographic characteristics of the secondary earner in a household, whereas the remaining 75 percent can be linked to the highest earner. Overall, we show that roughly 65 percent of the explained increase in household income inequality stems from demographic changes in the structure of Canadian households
The trade-creation effect of migrants: a multi-country general equilibrium analysis
I develop a general equilibrium multi-country model that allows for interaction between firm production and exporting decisions and individual migration decisions. Migrants lower trade costs and influence the number of firms that find it profitable to operate domestically or in foreign markets. This reduction in trade costs impacts consumer welfare by affecting the amount and range of differentiated products available locally or imported for consumption. This trade-creation effect amplifies welfare gains of migration for net-immigration countries and mitigates the losses for net-emigration countries. Welfare losses under the current levels of migration compared to a no-migration counterfactual worsen from -1.24% to -3.00% and -2.44% to -3.54%, for Portugal and Poland respectively, if the trade-creation effect of migration is ignored. For countries with a large diaspora distributed among many countries such as Portugal or Poland, the trade-creation effect mitigates some of the loss in welfare stemming from the labour market and market size effects of a loss in population from emigration.
Research on Labour Market Impacts of the Temporary Foreign Worker Program (with Michael Haan, Federico Lombardo, and Yoko Yoshida)
In this study, we investigate the labour market impacts of Canada’s Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP) during the 2010-2017 time period using detailed data sourced from individual and firm tax files, as well as TFWP administrative records. We find a negative correlation between low-skilled TFW employment and the annual earnings of Canadians employed in the same firms. The negative correlation between earnings and low-skilled TFW employment is strongest for Canadians with low earnings in a firm. An additional low-skilled TFW worker at a particular firm is correlated with a 0.57% decrease in the earnings of the lowest earning Canadians (i.e., those in the first quartile) at the same firm. We show this effect in a series of regressions where we decompose TFW employment at a firm by skill level and interact this variable with the placement of Canadians within the firm’s earnings distribution. These findings are consistent across the pre-reform (2010-2013) and post-reform (2014-2017) time periods. We also find that both low-skilled and high-skilled TFW employment is correlated with higher earnings of Canadian workers for those at the upper end of a firm’s earnings distribution. These results showcase how the impact of the TFWP on Canadians is highly dependant on the substitutability between TFW hires and Canadian workers.