Barry R. Chiswick, a renowned economist who served on the President’s Council of Economic Advisers under Gerald Ford, will become the new chair of GW’s Department of Economics in January.
Dr. Chiswick will come to the Columbian College of Arts and Sciences from the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he serves as a distinguished professor and founding director of the UIC Center for Economic Education.
“We are thrilled to have someone of Barry’s caliber join our ranks,” says Peg Barratt, Columbian College dean. “His scholarship will greatly advance our reputation as a premier research university, one that is engaging the world from the nation’s capital on the pressing issues of the day.”
Dr. Chiswick’s 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.
He has written 14 books and more than 160 scholarly article and book chapters. Dr. Chiswick has also appeared before Congress and served as a consultant for several U.S. government agencies and international organizations, including the World Bank.
“It will be wonderful to be back in Washington at a university where students and faculty are fully engaged in the realities and impact of a global economy,” says Dr. Chiswick. “I look forward to my tenure there and to working with my new colleagues to enhance GW’s research in economics and to educate the next generation of economists.”
Dr. Chiswick received a doctorate in economics with distinction from Columbia University in 1967 and has held permanent and visiting appointments at Columbia, the University of California Los Angeles, Stanford University, Princeton University, UIC, City University of New York, Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv University in Israel, the University of Haifa in Israel and Ben-Gurion University in Israel.
From 1973 to 1977, Dr. Chiswick served on the President’s Council of Economic Advisers. He’s also served as chairman of the American Statistical Association Census Advisory Committee and past president of the European Society for Population Economics.
Currently, he is the 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. Dr. Chiswick is also the program director for migration studies at the Institute for the Study of Labor in Bonn, Germany.
Dr. Chiswick has received numerous awards including a Fulbright Research Fellowship, the Senior University Scholar Award from UIC, the Milken Institute Award for Distinguished Economic Research and an honorary doctorate from Lund University in Sweden.