Barry Chiswick on immigration, the American Jewish experience, and how to measure discrimination

Barry Chiswick, Professor of Economics and International Affairs at George Washington University, joins the podcast to discuss his wealth of research on immigration and what he learned studying Jewish Americans in the labor market.

In this episode, Chiswick and Ashenfelter discuss: 

• How an economics course at Brooklyn College, taught by an off-Broadway actor, helped Chiswick fall in love with economics.
• Chiswick’s experience, as a graduate student at Columbia, working with Gary Becker and Jacob Mincer on what became known as the human capital earnings function. 
• Chiswick’s “second Ph.D. education”—working as a staff economist on the Council of Economic Advisers.
• Chiswick’s early research on immigration and the problems with U.S. immigration policy today.
• Chiswick’s research on the Jewish experience in the United States—which culminated in his 2020 book “Jews at Work”—and how to measure discrimination using the tools of economics.

Barry Chiswick earned his Ph.D. in economics from Columbia University in 1967. He has served on the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, as chairman of the American Statistical Association Census Advisory Committee, and as a past president of the European Society for Population Economics. "The Work Goes On"—a podcast produced as Princeton's Industrial Relations Section (IR Section) celebrates its 100th anniversary—is an oral history of industrial relations and labor economics hosted by Princeton's Orley Ashenfelter.