Giovanni Peri
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Giovanni Peri (born September 19, 1969, in
Perugia Perugia ( , ; ; ) is the capital city of Umbria in central Italy, crossed by the River Tiber. The city is located about north of Rome and southeast of Florence. It covers a high hilltop and part of the valleys around the area. It has 162,467 ...
,
Italy Italy, officially the Italian Republic, is a country in Southern Europe, Southern and Western Europe, Western Europe. It consists of Italian Peninsula, a peninsula that extends into the Mediterranean Sea, with the Alps on its northern land b ...
) is an Italian-born American economist who is Professor and Chair of the Department of Economics at the
University of California, Davis The University of California, Davis (UC Davis, UCD, or Davis) is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Davis, California, United States. It is the northernmost of the ten campuses of the University ...
, where he directs the Global Migration Center. He is also a research associate at the
National Bureau of Economic Research The National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) is an American private nonprofit research organization "committed to undertaking and disseminating unbiased economic research among public policymakers, business professionals, and the academic co ...
and the co-editor of the
peer-review Peer review is the evaluation of work by one or more people with similar competencies as the producers of the work ( peers). It functions as a form of self-regulation by qualified members of a profession within the relevant field. Peer review ...
ed ''
Journal of the European Economic Association The ''Journal of the European Economic Association'' is a peer-reviewed academic journal covering all aspects of economics. It was established in 2003 and is published by Wiley-Blackwell on behalf of the European Economic Association. The current m ...
''. He is known for his research on the economic impact of
immigration to the United States Immigration to the United States has been a major source of population growth and Culture of the United States, cultural change throughout much of history of the United States, its history. As of January 2025, the United States has the la ...
. He has also researched the economic determinants of international migrations and the Economic impact of immigration in several European Countries. He has challenged and broadened the work of
George Borjas George Jesus Borjas ( born Jorge Jesús Borjas, October 15, 1950) is a Cuban-American economist and the Robert W. Scrivner Professor of Economics and Social Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. He has been described as "America’s leading immigr ...
, which has argued that immigration has negative economic effects on low educated US workers.


Research

Giovanni Peri's research interests focus on
labour economics Labour economics seeks to understand the functioning and dynamics of the Market (economics), markets for wage labour. Labour (human activity), Labour is a commodity that is supplied by labourers, usually in exchange for a wage paid by demanding ...
, with a focus on
regional In geography, regions, otherwise referred to as areas, zones, lands or territories, are portions of the Earth's surface that are broadly divided by physical characteristics (physical geography), human impact characteristics (human geography), and ...
and
urban economics Urban economics is broadly the economic study of urban areas; as such, it involves using the tools of economics to analyze urban issues such as crime, education, public transit, housing, and local government finance. More specifically, it is a bra ...
as well as on
international migration International migration occurs when people cross state boundaries and stay in the host state for some minimum length of the time. Migration occurs for many reasons. Many people leave their home countries in order to look for economic opportunities ...
. According to
IDEAS/RePEc Research Papers in Economics (RePEc) is a collaborative effort of hundreds of volunteers in many countries to enhance the dissemination of research in economics. The heart of the project is a decentralized database of working papers, preprints, ...
, he belongs to the 1% of most cited economists. In his research, Peri has frequently collaborated with
Gianmarco Ottaviano Gianmarco Ireo Paolo Ottaviano (born in Milan on September 29, 1967) is an Italian economist and Professor of Economics at Bocconi University. Biography A native of Milan, Gianmarco Ottaviano earned a bachelor's degree in Economic and Social S ...
, Chad Sparber and Francesc Ortega.


Research on innovation

An early area of Peri's research has been the economics of innovation over time and across space. Together with Laura Bottazzi, he finds only small and very localized innovation spillovers in Europe and estimates that, while doubling R&D spending in a region would raise innovation there by 80-90%, it the effect within a 300 km radius would raise the output of new ideas only by 2-3%. Relatedly, Peri estimates that, on average, only 20% of knowledge in 1975-96 was learned outside the region of origin, and only 9% was learned outside the country of origin, with two notable exceptions: the knowledge in the computer sector and the knowledge generated by technological leaders, both of which flow much farther, especially compared to trade flows. Finally, again with Bottazzi, Peri shows that, in the long run, internationally generated knowledge is an important driver of innovation in a country, with e.g. a 1% positive shock to the log of R&D in the
U.S. The United States of America (USA), also known as the United States (U.S.) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It is a federal republic of 50 states and a federal capital district, Washington, D.C. The 48 contiguous ...
increasing knowledge creation in other countries by, on average, 0.35% over the next decade.


Research on immigration

By far, Peri's most prolific field has been the economics of international migration, including through its impact on cultural diversity and task specialization. Exploring the causes and effects of international migrations to
OECD The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD; , OCDE) is an international organization, intergovernmental organization with 38 member countries, founded in 1961 to stimulate economic progress and international trade, wor ...
countries in 1980–2005, Peri and Francesc Ortega find that bilateral migration flows are increasing in the income gap between origin and destination but decrease when destination countries adopt stricter immigration laws. Moreover, they also find that - on average - immigration increases the total GDP of the destination country in the short run one-for-one, without crowding-out of natives or effect on average wages and average income pr person. More recently, in work with Frédéric Docquier and Caglar Ozden, Peri investigated the labour market effects of migration flows in OECD countries during the 1990s, finding a positive effect of immigration on the wages of less educated natives and no effect on average native wages, while emigration decreased the wages of less educated native workers and increased inequality within countries.


Research on immigration to the U.S.

With Gianmarco Ottaviano, Peri investigates the relationship between
linguistic diversity Language is a structured system of communication that consists of grammar and vocabulary. It is the primary means by which humans convey meaning, both in spoken and signed forms, and may also be conveyed through writing. Human language is ch ...
across U.S. cities and local productivity over 1970–90; together, they find that wages and employment density of U.S.-born workers were systematically higher, all else equal, in cities with higher linguistic diversity, especially for highly educated and for white workers, and that the relationship was strengthened the better non-native speakers were assimilated in terms of language skills and duration of residence. Further research by Peri and Ottaviano on the value of cultural diversity - this time as proxied by the diversity of countries of birth of U.S. residents - suggests that US-born citizens living in metropolitan areas with increasing shares of foreign-born residents experienced significant growth in wages and housing values. Ottaviano's and Peri's thinking about the effects of immigration on natives' wages turns around the notion that natives and foreigners are inherently imperfectly substitutable even within the same skill group. Using this framework, they show that immigration to the U.S. in 1990-2006 had small negative short-run effects on native high school dropouts (-0.7%) and average wages (-0.4%), while raising the wages of native high school dropouts and average native wages in the long run by 0.3% and 0.6%, respectively, but depressing the long-run wages of ''previous'' immigrants by 6.7%. In further work with Chad Sparber, Peri demonstrated that U.S. foreign-born workers specialize in occupations characterized by manual-physical labour skills, whereas natives pursue jobs more intensive in communication tasks, which may contribute to the rather modest wage consequences of immigration for less educated native-born workers. In line with this account, another study by Peri with Ottaviano and Greg Wright observed that manufacturing industries with a larger increase in exposure to globalization (through
offshoring Offshoring is the relocation of a business process from one country to another—typically an operational process, such as manufacturing, or supporting processes, such as accounting. Usually this refers to a company business, although state gover ...
or immigration) saw improvements in terms of native employment growth relative to less exposed industries. They explain this finding through a model wherein natives, immigrants and offshore workers differ systematically in their ability to apply complex skills and wherein jobs vary in the degree to which their performance requires complex skills. In this framework, the productivity effect related to more efficient task assignment - producers hiring natives, immigrants and offshore workers for different tasks according to their respective comparative advantage - may offset the displacement effect of immigration and offshoring on natives' employment. More recently, Peri has analyzed the long-run impact of immigration on U.S. productivity, with the findings suggesting that immigration promoted total factor productivity growth through task specialization facilitated by the adoption of production technologies aimed at an unskilled workforce; by contrast, Peri didn't find any evidence that immigrants crowded out native employment. This account was further corroborated by research with Sparber and Kevin Shih on the growth of
STEM Stem or STEM most commonly refers to: * Plant stem, a structural axis of a vascular plant * Stem group * Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics Stem or STEM can also refer to: Language and writing * Word stem, part of a word respon ...
workers across U.S. cities, which found increases in STEM workers to be associated with significant wage gains for natives, especially college-educated natives, as well as with total factor productivity growth.


Research on immigration in Europe

An early foray into the topic of migration occurred with Andrea Ischino and Sascha Becker, with whom Peri studied the size of the brain drain from
Italy Italy, officially the Italian Republic, is a country in Southern Europe, Southern and Western Europe, Western Europe. It consists of Italian Peninsula, a peninsula that extends into the Mediterranean Sea, with the Alps on its northern land b ...
, finding that the human capital content of emigrants from Italy increased significantly during the 1990s across regions and age groups. The topic of brain drain was later revisited by Peri in work with Karin Mayr, in which they showed that the combination of return migration and incentives for education related to the prospects of high-skilled migration had the potential to turn emigration's brain drain into a significant brain gain for the country of origin. With regard to the labour market effects of immigration to Western Germany during the 1990s, Peri - together with Ottaviano and Francesco d'Amuri - finds that immigration had a sizeable adverse effect on previous immigrants' employment and a small adverse effect on their wages, while having very little adverse effects on native wages and employments; the authors explain this divergence through the higher substitutability between different groups of immigrants relative to that between immigrants and natives. In further work on the impact of immigrants in Western Europe on the type and quantity of native jobs in 1996–2010, Peri and D'Amuri find that immigrants pushed natives towards more "complex" jobs by crowding them out of manual-routine type of occupations, a job upgrade resulting in - on average - a 0.7% increase in native wages for a doubling of immigrants' share of the labour force; this upgrading process was mitigated by employment protection and slowed but didn't stop during the Great Recession. This finding was further strengthened by research with Mette Foged on Denmark, which showed that an increase in foreign refugees pushed less educated native workers to pursue less manual-intensive occupations and thereby raised native unskilled wages, employment and occupational mobility. Finally, together with Francisco Requena-Silvente, Peri has observed a "trade creation effect" for immigrants in Spain, i.e., immigrants significantly increased the volume of exports, especially for differentiated goods and for exports to countries that are culturally distant from Spain.


Other research

Further significant studies by Peri include research on human capital externalities, the long-run substitutability between more and less educated workers and the link between regional non-adjustment and fiscal policy: * Comparing pre-Eurozone patterns of regional adjustment in
Germany Germany, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It lies between the Baltic Sea and the North Sea to the north and the Alps to the south. Its sixteen States of Germany, constituent states have a total popu ...
,
Italy Italy, officially the Italian Republic, is a country in Southern Europe, Southern and Western Europe, Western Europe. It consists of Italian Peninsula, a peninsula that extends into the Mediterranean Sea, with the Alps on its northern land b ...
, the UK, the U.S., and
Canada Canada is a country in North America. Its Provinces and territories of Canada, ten provinces and three territories extend from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean and northward into the Arctic Ocean, making it the world's List of coun ...
, Peri and
Maurice Obstfeld Maurice Moses "Maury" Obstfeld (born March 19, 1952) is a professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley and previously Chief Economist at the International Monetary Fund. He is also a nonresident senior fellow at the Peterson ...
find that - relative to the U.S. - these countries rely more on transfers between regions and less on labour migration and their adjustment seems to be slower, though adjustments in regional real exchange rates are small in all countries; consequently, Peri and Obstfeld argue that EU Member States will be tempted to create a transfer union, to which they propose an alternative involving a relaxed Stability Pact, further restrictions on central EU borrowing, labour market and fiscal reforms, and the issuance of national debts indexed to nominal GDP. * Estimating the aggregate long-run elasticity of substitution between more educated and less educated workers in the U.S. over 1950–90 by using time- and state-dependent child labour and compulsory schooling laws as instruments, Peri and Antonio Ciccone find it to be around 1.5; * Using a novel approach to identify the externalities of human capital, Peri and Ciccone find no evidence of significant average-schooling externalities across U.S. cities and states in 1970–90;


References


External links


Faculty pagePersonal page
at University of California, Davis website * * {{DEFAULTSORT:Peri, Giovanni Living people 21st-century American economists Labor economists Bocconi University alumni Italian emigrants to the United States People from Perugia University of California, Davis faculty University of California, Berkeley alumni Italian academic journal editors 1969 births Migration economists American academic journal editors