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joined the Alberta School of Business on July 1, 2025, as an associate professor in the Department of Marketing, Business Economics and Law. His career has taken him from the University of British Columbia’s Sauder School of Business to the Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, where he spent 11 years examining how geography influences markets and decision-making. 

With expertise in urban economics, industrial organization and public economics, Schiff’s current projects study “policing for profit” in U.S. municipalities and labor market effects of ethnic neighborhoods. He has future work planned examining immigration and housing affordability.

Welcome to the Alberta School of Business! What brought you here?

The Alberta School of Business is a strong research institute and has recently made a big push into real estate and urban economics, hiring multiple researchers in those areas. I think it's a fantastic opportunity to work with new and existing faculty as part of this group.

How would you describe your main research interests?

My research spans a number of topics, including competition between businesses, the US college market, local government interactions, and immigrant neighborhoods, but a common theme across my projects is the study of how geography affects markets and economic decisions. 

One of my current projects is on “policing for profit,” which is the practice of police issuing speeding tickets and other citations in part to raise money for the local government (some of which may trickle down to the police department). What does this have to do with geography? Well, I think that most police departments are motivated by safety and not revenue generation, but the ones that may be doing this seem to have particular characteristics. In our data, which covers the state of Missouri from 2010-2019, we find that municipal governments with the highest share of revenue from fines and fees tend to be quite small and often have a large highway running through the municipality. This allows these municipalities to issue tickets to highway drivers who are predominantly non-residents, allowing the municipality to raise revenue without taxing residents (“tax exporting”). Thus, the decentralized nature of policing in the US — each Missouri municipality can have its own department — and the geography of local government, where a typical commute in the St. Louis area may involve passing through five or more distinct municipalities, greatly exacerbates this problem. 

Our paper studies a change in Missouri law, enacted after the killing of Michael Brown by a police officer in 2014, which restricted the amount of money that can be raised from fines and fees to 20% of a municipality’s operating budget. We find that this policy greatly reduced police department collections and led to fewer stops in affected municipalities.

What have you learned or discovered about the school, the students, or the wider Edmonton community, so far?

What I’ve learned since moving here is that the university, and the city of Edmonton, are in a remarkable (and exciting) growth phase. My son loves cement trucks and there is no shortage of these on city streets, even in residential neighborhoods where changes in zoning law have allowed for the construction of new 8-unit apartment buildings (“infill”). 

The university is also growing, which brings many students with different backgrounds and perspectives, both domestically and internationally. Infill policies change neighborhood characteristics and thus are always controversial in any city in any country — I look forward to debating the merits of these policies with my Â鶹ÊÓƵ students.

What are you most looking forward to in your teaching and research here in the years ahead?

On the research side, I’m quite interested in issues surrounding Canadian immigration and housing. Canada has long been a welcoming place for immigrants — and I think has greatly benefitted from this immigration — but recent government immigration policies are more restrictive. These seem in part due to housing affordability and the concern that immigration has raised housing prices. Is there actually strong evidence for a causal link between immigration and Canadian housing prices? A growing economy can attract immigrants and raise housing prices, without the first result being a cause of the second. If there is strong evidence for immigration raising housing prices, what is the optimal policy to address housing affordability that mitigates the potential negative effects (e.g., labor shortage issues) of very restrictive immigration policies? 

In my teaching, I look forward to talking over issues like this with my students. I am an immigrant to Canada and there are wide gaps in my knowledge of the Canadian economy; perhaps through discussions with my students I can start to fill in these gaps.

Outside of work, what do you enjoy doing in your spare time?

One of my favourite things to do with free time is just wander around city streets. I can wander for hours without getting tired and sometimes this helps me think of research ideas about cities. When I was a graduate student, I was aimlessly strolling around Manhattan one day when I began to wonder why New York had such a diversity of restaurants while other big US cities did not. Of course, New York is the largest city in the US, but how exactly does product variety scale with population? And further, New York is also extremely dense, could population density play a separate role by decreasing transportation cost to retailers? 

This led to my first paper, which showed that even after controlling for income, immigrant diversity, and a large set of other city characteristics, there is a systematic relationship between product variety, city size and density: large, dense cities increase variety by spatially concentrating people with diverse tastes. 

On a different occasion I was walking around Chinatown with Tianran Dai — also new MBEL faculty — when we began to wonder how ethnic neighborhoods form, how they grow, and how long do they last. We realized that this was unknown, partly because there was no systematic way to define an ethnic neighborhood. This led to our first paper on ethnic neighborhoods, where we offer a statistical definition of a neighborhood and then provide the first comprehensive description of ethnic neighborhood characteristics and dynamics using five decades of US census data, 1970-2010. See for maps of neighborhoods across groups and years.