Kate Baggott

Closing the On-Reserve/Off-Reserve Indigenous Education Gap: Noah Spencer

December 1, 2025 By Kate Baggott

For Indigenous K-12 students in Canada, educational outcomes can be very different depending on whether they live on or off reserves.

“In my dataset, which covers students graduating between 2007 and 2019, [the high school completion rate] was 51% among on-reserve Indigenous students and 71% among off-reserve Indigenous students, compared to 89% among non-Indigenous students,” said Noah Spencer, a PhD candidate with the Department of Economics.

In Spencer’s paper, Neighbourhoods, Schools, and Funding: Evidence on the On-reserve/Off-reserve Indigenous Education Gap, he uses administrative data from British Columbia to test whether the education gap is due to population-level differences or institutional features of reserves.

“In my paper, I exploit variation in the age at which students move to and from reserves. This approach lets me isolate causal exposure effects rather than just compositional differences,” he said.

Spencer ultimately finds that causal exposure effects explain a large share of the on-reserve/off-reserve Indigenous gap. A key mechanism appears to be attendance of underfunded on-reserve schools. [Read more…]

Bisma Khan on How Busing Can Move Developing Cities Forward

November 27, 2025 By Kate Baggott

Access to public transit infrastructure changes the patterns of where people live and work. Economists also know those changes are necessarily all improvements, nor do they affect everyone. Bisma Khan, a PhD Candidate with the Department of Economics, studied the creation and implementation of Lahore’s Rapid Transit Bus System (BRT) to learn exactly what changes public transit in developing countries can deliver and for whom. She examined how this introduction of public transit affected residential sorting, and labour supply.

For her job market paper, Public Transit, Residential Sorting and Labor Supply: Evidence and Theory from Lahore’s Bus Rapid Transit System, Khan compared areas within 2 km of completed BRT stops with areas within 2 km of planned, but not yet completed bus lines. Using this quasi-experimental design, her paper highlights the differing consequences of transit infrastructure in developing cities for different population segments. [Read more…]

Using Nonlinearities to Deal with Unpredictable Economic Shocks: Quinlan Lee

November 25, 2025 By Kate Baggott

Covid-19 may have started as a public health crisis, but it also delivered a lasting shock to the world economy. Accompanied by interest rate hikes and inflation, the pandemic sparked fundamental changes to how people interact and altered the behaviour of households, firms and financial markets. Quinlan Lee, a PhD Candidate with the Department of Economics, is focused on developing new tools for understanding how shocks like these, and the reactions they create, affect the economy over time.

An econometrician, Lee develops analytical tools for complex mathematical models with a broad spectrum of practical applications.

“There’s so much uncertainty nowadays, and the world feels unpredictable,” Lee explained. “That means the models economists use need to be much more complex. My job market paper focuses on nonlinear dynamics because they’ve become more and more prevalent as things get unpredictable.” [Read more…]

The Little Schoolhouses that Transformed Canada: Devin Bissky Dziadyk

November 19, 2025 By Kate Baggott

The one-room schoolhouse is a historical fixture of the Canadian identity. If anything, the legacy of these little rural centres of childhood literacy may not loom largely enough. According to new research by Devin Bissky Dziadyk, a PhD candidate with the Department of Economics, the expansion of one-room schoolhouses during the 1900s shaped economic history, and regional development and ultimately sparked the reallocation of labor out of Canadian agriculture.

Bissky Dziadyk wanted to understand if and how having access to a nearby school changed the paths that early 20^th century rural children followed as they grew up.

“What I find is that children who had access to this very early form of education made dramatically different life choices compared to those who didn’t,” said Bissky Dziadyk. “They were more likely to move out of agricultural occupations, earn higher incomes as adults, and shift into a specific set of higher-skilled jobs, particularly becoming teachers or managers.” [Read more…]

Jiaying Gu Appointed Canada Research Chair

November 18, 2025 By Kate Baggott

Associate Professor Jiaying Gu of the Department of Economics is now a Canada Research Chair (CRC). Gu’s Tier 2 CRC in Statistical Decision Making comes with a total award of $120,000 for each year of its five-year renewable term. [Read more…]

Closing the On-Reserve/Off-Reserve Indigenous Education Gap: Noah Spencer

Bisma Khan on How Busing Can Move Developing Cities Forward

Using Nonlinearities to Deal with Unpredictable Economic Shocks: Quinlan Lee

The Little Schoolhouses that Transformed Canada: Devin Bissky Dziadyk

Jiaying Gu Appointed Canada Research Chair

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