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Everything Economics at the University of Toronto
When male physicians have daughters, their female patients experience better health outcomes. A new working paper by Professor Tianyi Wang of the Department of Economics and his co-authors suggests that the empathy that grows from fathering daughters leads male physicians to order more tests and confirm diagnoses earlier, creating better treatment outcomes for female patients who experience breast cancer and gynecological cancers. [Read more…]
If you’re advising people to make better decisions, you’d better give them appealing alternatives to choose from. That’s one takeaway from PhD candidate Alex Ballyk’s behavioural economics research. The Department of Economics’ student explores decision making through experiments at the Toronto Experimental Economics Laboratory (TEEL). In the experiment at the heart of her working paper Paternalistic Persuasion, Ballyk designated participants as experts (called “Advisors”) to try to help a second group of participants (called “Choosers”) to make better decisions by giving them advice. However, persuading Choosers was challenging: Choosers weren’t sure whether all recommendations came from those well-meaning Advisors. Therefore, Advisors needed to send recommendations that Choosers could trust to be in their best interest. [Read more…]
Corporate lobbying impacts innovation and overall productivity in the U.S. Nasir Hossein Dad and his co-author have built a quantitative model that shows how firms decide to invest in lobbying and research and development (R&D) to strategically grow. Dad, a PhD candidate with the Department of Economics, and his co-author, Duc Nguyen have found that lobbying might substitute for R&D, reducing firms’ incentive to innovate, or complement it by increasing returns on innovation, making the net effect uncertain. [Read more…]
Stephen Tino is a first-generation Canadian whose upbringing was rooted in the immigration experience. As a PhD candidate in the Department of Economics at the University of Toronto, he has been drawing on that experience to explore the pay gap between immigrants and non-immigrants in the country.
“In various countries around the world, immigrants tend to earn less than non-immigrants,” Tino explained. “The pay gap in Canada is around 16%, and this is similar to the pay gap in other countries. A lot of previous research into the immigrant pay gap focuses on the skills of the workers, such as the language skills of immigrants when they come to a new country or their literacy, or how the different types of education they receive in their home countries might not translate to the same types of jobs in the host country. [Read more…]
The Department of Economics’ Anubha Agarwal is examining an understudied aspect of how firms expand into multiple geographic markets. The PhD candidate’s study looks at how the number of geographic markets of firms in non-tradable sectors and competition in local markets increased in Canada between 2001-2018. Using her model, she finds that the rise in the innovation costs for entrepreneurs, compositional changes in entrants, and the increase in product differentiation between local varieties can explain most of these empirical trends. The study also finds that subsidizing the geographic expansion of more productive and more expansion-efficient firms can increase social welfare and efficiency in the economy.
“Firms can grow within a market by increasing their size, but my focus is on how firms grow by entering multiple geographic markets. Growth in geographic markets is important for firms in non-tradable goods and services sectors, like coffee shops or financial services that require physical presence near customers,” Agarwal said. [Read more…]