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Understanding the Immigrant Pay Gap: Stephen Tino

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Portrait of Stephen Tino
Stephen Tino Photo: A. Macedo

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…]

How Businesses Manage Geographic Expansion: Anubha Agarwal

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Portrait of Anubha Agarwal
Anubha Agarwal Photo: A.Macedo

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…]

Exploring Grade Shocks and Undergraduate Program Choices with Annabel Thorton

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Portrait of Annabel Thorton
Annabel Thorton Photo: A.Macedo

Exam scheduling can have a long-term impact on both students’ choice of majors and their future earnings. The finding comes from “Persevere or Pivot? The Causal Impact of Grade Shocks on the College Major Decision,” a new paper by Annabel Thorton, a PhD candidate with the Department of Economics. Thorton’s research project looked at random variations in exam timetable characteristics to estimate the effect of grade shocks on students’ major choices. She found that when students write two exams close together, they tend to do more poorly on the second one, resulting in a student’s course grade to drop by approximately 1%. That 1% drop in grade value, a grade shock, then reduced the likelihood of a student majoring in that subject by 11%. Thorton’s data comes from all first-year Faculty of Arts and Sciences students at the University of Toronto. [Read more…]

The Experienced MA: Graduand LJ Valencia

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Portrait of LJ Valencia
LJ Valencia

In their final year, with convocation on the horizon, many undergraduates talk about coming back to university for a graduate degree after they work for a few years and put some money in their pockets. New grad LJ Valencia now knows exactly what it’s like to see that plan through. A proud Edmontonian, Valencia came to UofT to complete his MA in September of 2023 after working for three years upon his graduation from the University of Alberta with a degree in economics and political science. Torn between thoughts of joining the job market and graduate studies, he decided to take some time and consider his options.

“I actually graduated in 2020 into a job market that was really tough,” Valencia remembered. I was lucky, though. First, I worked at Western Economic Diversification Canada. We worked on projects to inform policy direction and federal investments to diversify Western Canada’s economy. Later, I moved to the Bank of Canada where I was a research assistant for two years, working in a software project and the short-term Real GDP forecasting team.” [Read more…]

Evidencing Hot Topics in the Labour Market with Xiner Xu

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Portrait of labour economist Xiner Xu who is on the 2024-25 academic job market.
Xiner Xu, Labour Economist & PhD Candidate

When it comes to hot topics like immigration and gender roles in the workplace, popular rhetoric doesn’t always separate common sense from shared fallacies. Xiner Xu wants the evidence to help her make that distinction. The result of Xu’s need for evidence is two research projects that are filling in the gaps between what no one knows, and what people just think they know, about the Canadian economy and its labour market.

The first is a research paper, “Understanding Firm Responses to Immigration Shocks,” that examines how Canadian businesses responded to the arrival of a large wave of immigrants who entered the Canadian labour market between 2016 and 2018. [Read more…]

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