Barry Chiswick

Education

Barry Chiswick received his BA in economics from Brooklyn College in 1962 before obtaining his MA and PhD in economics from Columbia University in 1964 and 1967, respectively.

Academic career

Barry Chiswick joined the University of California, Los Angeles as assistant professor of economics in 1966, gaining tenure as associate professor in 1970, but was on leave at Columbia University from 1969 to 1971. In 1971 Chiswick moved to the City University of New York as a tenured associate professor of economics, being promoted to full professor in 1975. Thereafter, he changed to the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) in 1978, where he worked as tenured research professor first in economics and after 1998 also in sociology until December 2010, becoming the UIC Distinguished Professor in 2002. At UIC, Chiswick headed the Department of Economics from 1997 to 2008, directed the newly-found Center for Economic Education (2000–2010) and became an affiliate of the Department of Germanic Studies (2000–2010). After taking up his new employment as the Professor of Economics at George Washington University in January 2011, he still remains Professor Emeritus at the UIC. Throughout his career Chiswick has been affiliated with the National Bureau of Economic Research, first as research analyst (1965–67) and later as research associate (1970–73), and served in various public positions, including the Council of Economic Advisers (1973–1977). He has also held numerous positions as visiting professor or scholar, e.g. at the American Enterprise Institute or the Hoover Institution and the University of Chicago, Princeton University, University of Haifa, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Tel Aviv University, and Ben-Gurion University. Furthermore, Chiswick has editorial responsibilities at several academic journals, namely the Journal of Population Economics, the Review of Economics of the Household, the Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance, Contemporary Jewry, the International Migration Review, and European Research Studies.

Research

Barry Chiswick's fields of interest include labor economics and human resources, immigration, language, and minorities, the economics of religion, economic theory, statistics and applied econometrics, and public policy analysis. The bibliographic database IDEAS/RePEc ranks him as belonging to the top 5% of authors in economics according to a number of metrics, e.g. average rank score, number of distinct works, and number of citations. His most-cited research article, published in 1978, analyzes the earnings of foreign-born adult white men by comparing these earnings with those of native born men as well as among foreign born men by country of origin, years in the United States, and citizenship and explores differences in the effects of schooling and post-school training, using 1970 U.S. census data. His research finds that immigrants' earnings to rise more rapidly with U.S. labor market experience than those of native born, although immigrants initially earn less than their native counterparts, resulting in immigrants' earnings exceeding those of native born after 10 to 15 years, independent of the immigrants' citizenship. In another highly cited article, co-authored with Paul W. Miller and published in 1995, Chiswick investigates which factors determine dominant language fluency, how it affects earnings, and its endogeneity with earnings among immigrants, wherein dominant language fluency is hypothesized to depend on exposure to the language, efficiency in learning a second language, and the economic benefits from language fluency and language skills affect earnings. Other seminal research contributions by Chiswick comprise the analysis of the substantial differences in earnings and education across racial and ethnic groups in the U.S. and their relationship with "tastes" for schooling, discrimination, and investments in child quality, the study of the determinants of English speaking and reading fluency among U.S. immigrants and the effects of fluency on earnings, and the investigation of the negative effect of ethnic networks on English language proficiency among Australian immigrants due to linguistic concentration, among others.

Memberships and professional associations