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Recent Submissions

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    Can skilled immigration policy raise innovation? Evidence from the Canadian 'points system'
    (University of Waterloo, 2017-12) Blit, Joel; Skuterud, Mikal; Zhang, Jue
    We examine the effect of changes in skilled-immigrant population shares in 98 Canadian cities between 1981 and 2006 on per capita patents. The Canadian case is of interest because its 'points system' for selecting immigrants is viewed as a model of skilled immigration policy. Our estimates suggest that the impact of increasing the share of university-educated immigrants on patenting rates is smaller than the impact that both native-borns have in Canada and immigrants have in the U.S.. The modest contribution of Canadian immigrants to innovation is largely explained by the fact that only about one-third of Canadian STEM-educated immigrants finds employment in STEM jobs (relative to two-fifths of the Canadian-born and one-half of immigrants in the U.S.). Consistent with this, we find a large and significant effect of STEM-educated immigrants when we also condition on STEM employment. Our results suggest potential benefits from giving employers a role in the selection of skilled immigrants.
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    Innovation as adaptation to natural disasters
    (University of Waterloo, 2017-11-14) Li, Hongxiu
    Can innovation be motivated by past natural disasters? Despite some recent research, the determinants of disaster-mitigating innovation are not well understood? Starting from a conceptual model combining perceived risk theory with the profit motive, this paper investigates the salience of innovation induced by natural disasters, using a unique dataset that includes U.S. patent data, and flood, drought, and earthquake damage data for the years 1977 to 2005. To address the potential endogeneity of disaster damage, I employ the control function approach with instrumental variables constructed from disaster intensity measurements. The results show that impact-reducing innovations at the state level respond to national disaster damage in the U.S. In general, the impact of natural disasters is not localized to a state-that is, disaster damage in a state also stimulates innovations in more-distant states. The findings in this paper highlight a policy role for the federal government in channelling and more effectively spurring impact-reducing innovations nationwide.
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    Regularized empirical likelihood as a solution to the no moment problem: The linear case with many instruments
    (University of Waterloo, 2017-11-29) Chausse, Pierre
    In this paper, we explore the finite sample properties of the generalized empirical likelihood for a continuum, applied to a linear model with endogenous regressors and many discrete moment conditions. In particular, we show that the estimator from this regularized version of GEL has finite moments. It therefore solves the issue regarding the no moment problem of empirical likelihood. We propose a data driven method to select the regularization parameter based on a cross validation criterion, and show that the method outperforms many existing methods when the number of instruments exceeds 20.
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    Causal inference using generalized empirical likelihood methods
    (University of Waterloo, 2017-12-07) Chausse, Pierre; Luta, George
    In this paper, we propose a one step method for estimating the average treatment effect, when the assignment to treatment is not random. We use a misspecified generalized empirical likelihood setup in which we constrain the sample to be balanced. We show that the implied probabilities that we obtain play a similar role as the weights from the weighting methods based on the propensity score. In Monte Carlo simulations, we show that GEL dominates many existing methods in terms of bias and root mean squared errors. We then aply our method to the training program studied by Lalonde (1986).
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    Fixed point approaches to the proof of the Bondavera-Shapley theorem
    (University of Waterloo, 2017-11-29) Forand, Jean Guillaume; Uyanik, Metin
    We provide two new proofs of the Bondareva-Shapley theorem, which states that the core of a transferable utility cooperative is nonempty if and only if the game is balanced. Both proofs exploit the fixed points of self-maps of the set of imputations, applying elementary existence arguments typically associated with noncooperative games to cooperative games.