The Impact of Immigrant Business Ownership on International Trade /

Acknowledgements The authors would like to thank, for their helpful comments, Jen Baggs of the University of Victoria; Runjuan Liu of the University of Alberta; Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada; seminar participants at the 2017 annual conference of the Canadian Economics Association and the 2017 Comparative Analysis of Enterprise Data Conference; the Bank of Canada; Global Affairs Cana [...] In the end, within the scope of all import and export activities (only merchandise trade) in Canada, the final sample (simple private corporations) accounted for 60% of all importers, 63% of all exporters, 15% of the value of all imports and 12% of the value of all exports in 2012. [...] The recent theoretical and empirical literature has also stressed the importance of extensive margins in international trade.11 At the firm level, the extensive margin of international trade with a certain partner includes the probability of importing or exporting, and the number of products traded by the firm. [...] The purpose of this section is to further assess the impact of immigrant business ownership on the probability of importing and exporting and on the extensive and intensive margins of trade at the firm level, after firm and owner characteristics are controlled for. [...] Based on the theoretical Equation (1), exports to region r. are determined by the output of region r. relative to the world output, the remoteness of region r , wages in Canada, the variable cost of exporting to r , firm productivity, the elasticity of substitution and the shape parameter of the Pareto distribution.