May 31, 2023, 5:30 p.m. | Collegio Carlo Alberto

MARCO DO LECTURE

IMMIGRATION AND CULTURAL INTEGRATION

Alberto Bisin

Professor of Economics, New York University

Introduced by Tito Boeri, President of Marco Fanno Association

Meeting in the run-up to the International Festival of Economics

The recent flow of migration to Western European countries represents one of the most complex and discussed socio-economic phenomena of the past three decades. Policies to restrict immigration are often motivated in these countries by the need to preserve original cultural traits-ethnic and religious-versus the slow cultural integration of immigrants. A detailed set of administrative data (ISTAT) on the universe of marriages, births, separations of immigrants in Italy from 1995 to 2012 allowed us to estimate the rate of cultural integration of immigrants by area of origin (with Giulia Tura, University of Milan – Bicocca). The underlying theoretical analysis shows that the integration rate is an equilibrium phenomenon, resulting from the interaction between the demand for integration, by immigrants, and the supply, by natives. Based on this theoretical approach, we can finally construct simulations and counterfactuals on the effects of various socio-economic policies regarding immigration and immigrants.

Alberto Bisin is professor of economics at New York University and a Fellow of the Econometric Society and the Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET). He is a member of various research institutes such as the NBER, CEPR, CESS of NYU. He has served as Associate Editor at various international academic journals, including the Journal of Comparative Economics, the Journal of Economic Theory, and Economic Theory.

His major research contributions are in the field of general economic equilibrium theory, the study of compartmental economics, and especially in the theoretical study of various socio-economic phenomena, such as the intergenerational transmission of cultural traits and the dynamics of institutions and political power of elites. His research is published in top academic journals. He edited the Handbook of Social Economics (with Jess Benhabib and Matthew Jackson, for Elsevier) and the Handbook of Historical Economics (with John Federico, for Elsevier/Academic Press).

He was a columnist for economic issues at the Turin newspaper La Stampa and for the daily La Repubblica. He is the author of a popular economic book in Italian, Fables and Numbers (Università Bocconi Editore). He is one of the founders and editors of the blog NoiseFromAmeriKa.