Barry R. Chiswick

Barry R. Chiswick is Professor at the Department of Economics, George Washington University (since January 2011). He was Chair of the Department from 2011-2015. He is also Professor of International Affairs at the Elliott School of International Affairs, George Washington University.

Previously, he was UIC Distinguished Professor (2002-2010), Research Professor (1978-2010), and Head (1987-2008) of the Department of Economics, University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). He was also founding Director of the UIC Center for Economic Education (2000-2010). In addition, he was the inaugural Program Director for Migration Studies at IZA – Institute for Labor Economics, Bonn (2004-2011).

He received his Ph.D. with Distinction in Economics from Columbia University (1967) and has held permanent and visiting appointments at UCLA, Columbia University, CUNY, Stanford University, Princeton University, Hebrew University (Jerusalem), Tel Aviv University, University of Haifa, and the University of Chicago. From 1973 to 1977 he was Senior Staff Economist at the President’s Council of Economic Advisers. He is a former chairman of the American Statistical Association Census Advisory Committee, and Past President of the European Society for Population Economics, the Midwest Economics Association, and the Illinois Economics Association. He has served as a consultant to numerous U.S. government agencies, as well as to the World Bank and other international organizations. He is currently Associate Editor of four journals, including the Journal of Population Economics and Review of Economics of the Household, and on the editorial boards of five additional academic journals.

Professor Chiswick has an international reputation for his research in Labor Economics, Human Resources, the Economics of Immigration, the Economics of Minorities, the Economics of Religion, and Income Distribution. He is recognized as having done the seminal research on the Economics of Immigration, and continues to be the leader in the field. He has published 22 books and monographs and over 170 scholarly journal articles and chapters in books, in addition to other publications. His most recent 3 books are the co-edited two volume Handbook on the Economics of International Migration (Elsevier, 2015) with Paul W. Miller, Foundations of Migration Economics (Oxford University Press, 2019) with George Borjas, and Jews at Work: Their Economic Progress in the American Labor Market (Springer, 2020). His research is highly cited in the academic literature; he is among the top one percent of economists cited in the academic literature according to RePEc. In addition to numerous seminar and conference presentations in the United States, Professor Chiswick has lectured in 22 other countries across the globe.

He has received numerous awards for his research. He was the recipient of the IZA Prize in Labor Economics (2011) for his research on international migration. Two years earlier, he was awarded a PhD (Honorary) from Lund University, Sweden (2009). Other honors include an appointment as Distinguished Professor at UIC (2002), a Fulbright Research Fellowship (1992), the Senior University Scholar Award from the University of Illinois (1987), the UIC College of Business Administration Alumni Award for Distinguished Research (first recipient, 1993), the Carleton C. Qualey Article Award from the Immigration History Society (first recipient, 1989) for his research on Hispanic Americans, the Milken Institute Award for Distinguished Economic Research (2001), the Marshall Sklare Award from the Association for the Social Scientific Study of Jewry (2007) for his research on Jewish Americans, and the 3M Economic Education Excellence Award from the Illinois Council on Economic Education (2007). He received the Distinguished Alumnus Award from Brooklyn College (1999) for his research on immigration and minorities. He also delivered the Julian Simon Lecture (2007) at IZA – Institute for Labor Economics (Bonn).

Professor Chiswick is frequently interviewed by the press and the electronic media on a range of issues, especially labor markets, immigration, and minorities. He has published policy analyses in newspapers and magazines, has testified before both houses of Congress on pending legislation, and has given public lectures to community groups on these and related issues. His recommendations regarding the reform of immigration policy have influenced the public debate.