I am currently a Predoctoral Research Fellow for David E. Weinstein at Columbia University. I received a Bachelor of Arts in Honours Economics from the Vancouver School of Economics, University of British Columbia, in May 2026. At UBC, I had the privilege of working for Réka Juhász at the Industrial Policy Group.
I am serving as the Co-Editor-in-Chief of the IONA Journal of Economics at UBC for the 2025-26 academic year along with Luigi Vicencio.
Research
Abstract
This paper studies how immigrants differ from natives in entrepreneurial talent and how immigration affects business dynamism in the United States. I develop a span-of-control model with talent heterogeneity across nativity groups, pre-entry talent uncertainty, and capital constraints, which helps identify the shape of underlying managerial talent. Using microdata from the 2007 Survey of Business Owners, I find that immigrants are positively selected on managerial talent at the margin, with fewer low-talent entrants than natives. I use an instrumental variable approach to show that a 1% increase in immigration to a US county raises average wages by 0.08%, firm size by 0.1%, and raises both entry and exit rates over a five-year period. I interpret these findings with my model framework and show that the immigrants arriving in the US from 1975 to 2010 were positively selected on managerial talent relative to the existing native population.