Barry R. Chiswick

Barry R. Chiswick is a renowned economist whose seminal research on labor markets and immigration has helped inform the nation’s public policy debate. A former economist on the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, Chiswick came to GW in 2011 from the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), where he served as a distinguished professor and founding director of the UIC Center for Economic Education. He was chairman of the GW Economics Department from 2011 to 2015.

Chiswick has authored and edited over 20 books and scholarly monographs, and more than 200 scholarly journal articles and chapters in books. His areas of interest include skill acquisition, the labor market adjustment and economic impact of immigrants and immigration policy, and the human capital and labor market behavior of racial, religious, and ethnic groups. His published public policy analyses have led to appearances before the U.S. Congress and consulting for U.S. government agencies and international organizations, such as the World Bank.

Chiswick received a PhD in Economics with Distinction from Columbia University in 1967, and has held permanent and visiting appointments at UCLA, Columbia University, Stanford University, Princeton University, University of Chicago, City University (New York), Hebrew University (Jerusalem), Tel Aviv University, the University of Haifa,  Ben-Gurion University, and The University of Illinois Chicago. From 1973 to 1977, he was Senior Staff Economist on the President’s Council of Economic Advisers. In addition, he served as chairman of the American Statistical Association Census Advisory Committee and past president of the European Society for Population Economics. From 2004 to 2011 he was the Program Director for Migration Studies at the Institute for the Study of Labor in Bonn, Germany. Since 1993, Chiswick has been a member of the ASA/NSF/Census Fellowship Program Review Board. He is currently Associate Editor of the Journal of Population Economics and Research in Economics of the Household and is on the editorial boards of four other academic journals.

Chiswick has received numerous awards for his research, including the IZA Prize in Labor Economics, a Fulbright Research Fellowship, the Senior University Scholar Award from the University of Illinois, the Carleton C. Qualey Article Award from the Immigration History Society, the Milken Institute Award for Distinguished Economic Research, the Marshall Sklare Award from the Association for the Social Scientific Study of Jewry, the 3M Economic Education Excellence Award from the Illinois Council on Economic Education, and an honorary doctorate from Lund University in Sweden.