CWEC Early Career Economists Lunch-Time Series (2024-2025)

Early career Women Economists:  Registration 

The Canadian Women Economists Committee (CWEC/CFÉC) is hosting a brownbag lunch time series. It will be held on the last Monday of every month from October 2024 to April 2025 except December (10 AM PT/11 AM MT/12 PM CT/1 PM ET/2 PM AT). Women economists early in their careers share a 20 minute presentation of a work-in-progress.   

 Upcoming  Seminars

October 28, 2024 

Speaker # 1 : Xiner Xu

Title: Understanding Firm Responses to Immigration Shocks

Abstract: Existing literature has documented that immigrants often work alongside their co-ethnics, suggesting that firms within the same geographic area can have different exposure to immigration shocks. How do businesses adjust when they have access to a larger pool of foreign workers relative to other local employers? This paper investigates how firms respond to an unprecedented wave of immigration to Canada between 2016 and 2018. Using rich matched employer-employee data, I construct a firm-level measure of exposure based on the geographic and ethnic composition of its pre-reform workforce. This measure can be decomposed into a common component, representing shocks affecting all businesses in the same labor market, and an idiosyncratic component, which captures the differential impact across firms within markets based on their unique history of immigrant employment. While both components contribute to higher output and productivity, the idiosyncratic component is particularly important for skill-intensive tasks such as exports and R&D. This suggests that firms with a relative advantage in recruiting migrants are better positioned to overcome informational frictions and select high-quality worker.

Speaker # 2: Carmen Andrea Quezada Hernandez

Title: Family Spillovers

Abstract: This paper studies family spillover effects, using school starting age (SSA) rules as a family shock. Using a regression discontinuity design and a rich dataset from Chile, I find that a later SSA negatively impacts younger siblings’ educational outcomes, reducing GPA, test scores, and post-secondary enrollment, while increasing grade retention. In contrast, older siblings are unaffected. Mothers reduce their labor supply and income by about 2\%, while fathers experience no significant changes. These labor effects persist until the child turns 20. This study suggests that the negative spillovers are partially mitigated when mothers are the primary earners, with less negative effects on their labor market outcomes and on younger siblings’ educational outcomes. Finally, this paper replicates the well-established effects of SSA on the focal student’s educational outcomes, while adding new results. In particular, students born after the cutoff date are less likely to become teen parents, especially males.

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