Considerable research focuses on why internal migration rates are declining across most of the Western world. Several studies also look at why people are less likely to change jobs than they were in the past. In this paper, we look at the prospect of declining economic returns as an explanation for the joint decline in both phenomena in Canada. We use the Canadian Employer‐Employee Dynamics Database, a linked job–individual–family–firm data set, to look at the 5‐year income trajectories for Canadian workers who changed job and province of residence (movers) in 1997, 2002, and 2007. We compare these returns with those of job switchers who did not move (nonmover job switchers) and with those that changed neither jobs nor province (nonmover nonjob switchers). We find that the mover's premium, defined as the increase in income that accompanies either a job change or a geographical move, has decreased over time and argue that this may help explain why internal migration and labour fluidity have been declining.

We examine how the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted trade between Canada and the United States, using a novel dataset on monthly bilateral trade flows between Canadian provinces and U.S. states, merged with COVID-19 health data. Our results show that a one-standard deviation increase in COVID-19 severity (case levels, hospitalizations, deaths) in a Canadian province leads to a fall of 3.1 to 4.9% in exports and a 6.7% to 9.1% fall in imports. Decomposing our analysis by industry, we determine that trade in the manufacturing industry was most negatively affected by the pandemic, while the agriculture industry suffered the least disruption to trade flows. Our descriptive evidence suggests that lockdowns may have also reduced Canadian exports and imports. However, while our regression coefficients are consistent with that finding, they are not statistically significant, perhaps because of the lack of variation due to similar timing in the imposition of restrictions across provinces.

En este artículo se evalúan las diferencias en la evolución sectorial y regional de la economía española durante la crisis del COVID-19. Para ello se analiza la heterogeneidad en indicadores sanitarios, las restricciones a la movilidad, la evolución del empleo, del gasto en tarjetas, la actividad y el bienestar entre los distintos sectores y regiones españolas. También se realiza un ejercicio de simulación del contrafactual para cada región de cuál hubiera sido su evolución diferencial respecto a la estructura sectorial de la región española promedio. Los resultados apuntan que, desde el primer trimestre de 2020 hasta el segundo de 2021, el componente sectorial explicaría el 44 % de las diferencias en la evolución del empleo regional respecto al de España, mientras que el componente idiosincrático el 56 % restante.

We examine how immigrant employment enhances trade at the firm level using unique administrative matched employer-employee data from Canada. We augment a standard model of firms' export market entry and sales decisions with trade costs that depend on destination-specific immigrant employment at the firm level. We estimate simple structural equations derived from the model that relate destination-specific exporting decisions to immigrant employment. We develop a method to deal with the potential endogeneity of immigrant employment that exploits the optimality conditions associated with the firm's employment decision. We find positive and statistically significant effects of firm level immigrant employment on exporting. These effects vary with product type and immigrant employee characteristics in ways consistent with the idea that immigrant employees alleviate information barriers to trade.* This paper uses administrative data provided through the Canadian Centre for Data Development and Economic Research (CDER) at Statistics Canada. We are extremely indebted to the staff at CDER, especially Beryl Li, Danny Leung, and Douwere Grekou, for making the data available and for their knowledgeable and patient assistance. We gratefully acknowledge financial support through the SSHRC Partnership Grant Productivity, Firms, and Incomes. We thank

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