I study how labour markets and social policies shape inequality, mobility, health, and well-being. My work combines applied econometrics with administrative and large-scale datasets, with recent projects evaluating immigration policy shocks (Canada’s TFWP reforms) and examining changing skill demands in the AI era.
I examine how inequality evolves across the life course and across generations, using administrative and survey data with cross-national and Canada-focused evidence.
Selected work
Lifecycle variation and Intergenerational income transmission (Labour Economics, 2017)
Neighbourhood income inequality in Canadian cities (Urban Studies, 2012)
Poverty comparisons and dominance (Canadian Journal of Economics, 2011)
Intergenerational earnings mobility among the children of Canadian immigrants (Review of Economics and Statistics, 2009)
Child poverty and changes in child poverty (Demography, 2008)
I study how health and disability shape employment exits, retirement pathways, and poverty risks, often in comparative perspective across welfare states.
Selected work
Disability, income support, and poverty (Canada–UK) (Journal of Social Policy, 2022)
Health and transitions into nonemployment (Economics & Human Biology, 2019)
Extending working lives beyond age 60 (PLoS ONE, 2020)
Longstanding illness and employment exit: A longitudinal study in Sweden (PLoS ONE, 2020)
European health inequality through the Great Recession (Sociology of Health & Illness, 2018)
I evaluate how immigration institutions and labour market policies affect wages, job quality, and longer-run outcomes, using quasi-experimental designs and linked data.
Selected work
Wage effects of Canada’s 2014 TFWP reform (Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 2026)
Agricultural Trade and Geopolitics: China-U.S. and China-Canada Trade Relations (China Agricultural Economic Review, 2026)
Multidimensional job quality in Canada (Canadian Public Policy, 2019)
Second-generation outcomes in Canada (Social Science Quarterly, 2019)
The impact of the employment insurance repayment policy (Applied Economics, 2010)
Canada’s 2014 tightening of the Temporary Foreign Worker Program provides a nationwide test of how restricting temporary migration affects firm performance. Using linked employer–employee records, we exploit pre-reform variation in firms’ reliance on temporary foreign workers to define policy exposure and trace post-reform outcomes, and we validate the results across alternative designs and productivity measures. Three findings stand out. (1) On average, the reform did not reduce productivity: more-exposed firms experienced modest, gradual gains in labour productivity, especially in lower-skill streams. (2) Effects are heterogeneous: gains are smaller among firms that already employ many immigrants and vary across sectors and regions. (3) Conclusions depend on the outcome measure—while labour productivity rises, revenue per worker declines slightly in more TFW-reliant firms, consistent with adjustments in prices and markups. This paper offers the first national firm-level evidence on a major temporary-migration reform and clarifies where productivity gains and policy trade-offs arise.
How can universities support student success amid growing diversity in academic preparation? This study addresses that question using rich administrative data from an upper-middle-tier public university in Taiwan—an institution representative of challenges faced by mass higher education systems. We focus on how post-admission factors, specifically instructional resources (i.e., class size and student–faculty ratios) and peer environments (i.e., exposure to high- or low-achieving peers and classroom heterogeneity), shape academic trajectories across eight semesters. Using longitudinal student–course records, we construct learning environment measures that vary across classrooms and semesters and are less prone to endogeneity than traditional inputs. Our findings indicate that smaller class sizes and lower student–faculty ratios have a significant positive impact on academic outcomes, particularly for students with lower academic abilities. Similarly, exposure to high-achieving peers enhances performance for academically weaker students, while high-ability students remain largely unaffected. In contrast, increased exposure to low-achieving peers and greater peer heterogeneity produce growing academic penalties over time. These results highlight the dynamic and asymmetric effects of post-admission learning environments, suggesting that targeted interventions in resource allocation and classroom grouping can help close achievement gaps. This offers practical insights for higher education systems undergoing rapid expansion.
With Chiara Criscuolo, Alexander Hijzen et al.
To what extent do differences in pay across firms contribute to overall wage inequality, and how does this vary across countries? We address this question by constructing a harmonised linked employer–employee dataset covering 20 OECD countries since the 2000s. On average across countries, differences in average wages between firms account for about half of overall wage inequality. Differences in firms’ pay premia account for about one third of the overall level of wage differences between firms. Over time, however, changes in these premia explain roughly two-thirds of the increase in wage differences between firms. The remaining share reflects differences in workforce composition across firms, including the sorting of higher-skilled workers into higher-paying firms. Firm wage premia dispersion is systematically higher in countries with more decentralised collective bargaining systems and lower collective bargaining coverage, and in countries where minimum wages are less binding.
With Lee Bentley, Philip McHale et al.
Background: In response to increases in the number of people in receipt of disability benefits many countries have reduced their income replacement rate in order to increase employment incentives. Using new OECD data on disability benefit income replacement rates, we investigate the relationship between adequacy, and employment and poverty rates among people with disabilities for 12 countries in Europe.
Methods: We estimate multilevel logistic regression models for both employment status and poverty using data from the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) alongside estimates of disability benefit income replacement rate for population sub-groups in each country from the OECD. We estimate associations between the income replacement rate with disability-employment and disability-poverty gaps (the difference in employment and poverty between disabled and non-disabled people). Sub-group analysis was conducted for age and sex.
Results : For each additional percentage point increase in income replacement rate there was a 0.30 percentage point reduction in the disability employment gap (95%CI 0.06 to 0.53) and a 0.12 percentage point reduction in the disability poverty gap (95%CI 0.02 to 0.21). The association between higher disability benefit income replacement rates and reduced disability employment gap was similar across all age groups, whilst the association with reductions in the disability poverty gap was strongest in the 50-64 year olds age group.
Conclusion: Reducing adequacy of disability benefits may not lead to improved employment prospects and may increase levels of poverty amongst people with disabilities.