Francisco L. Rivera-Batiz is a Professor of Economics and Education at Teachers College, and a Professor of International and Public Affairs (affiliate) at the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia. He is the former Director of the Program in Economic Policy Management (SIPA, 1996-2002), Director of the Latino Studies Program (Columbia College, 1997-1999), and Director of the Institute for Urban and Minority Education (Teachers College, 1991-1995). He also held a joint faculty appointment at Columbia’s Economics Department between 1996 and 2002. He is currently affiliated with the Columbia Population Research Center, and the Institute of Latin American Studies. Before joining Columbia's faculty, Dr. Rivera-Batiz held teaching or research appointments at the University of Chicago, the University of Pennsylvania, Rutgers University in New Brunswick, the University of Puerto Rico, and the University of Wisconsin at Madison. He received his Bachelor's degree with Distinction in All Subjects from Cornell University in 1975 and a Ph.D. in Economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1979.
Research Interests: international and development economics, education and its impact on labor markets, international migration, and Latino and Latin American studies.
Publications:
His publications in international and development economics include the textbook, International Finance and Open Economy Macroeconomics (Prentice Hall, with L. Rivera-Batiz) whose second edition was released in 1994 (a third edition is in preparation), the co-edited book, The Political Economy of the East Asian Crisis (Edward Elgar Publishers Ltd., Cheltenham, U.K., 2001, with A. Lukauskas), as well as a Special edited issue of the Review of Development Economics on "Democracy, Participation and Economic Development (2002, with Luis Rivera-Batiz).
In the area of education, his publications include the edited book volume Reinventing Urban Education (IUME Press, Teachers College, Columbia Univ., 1994), and his papers "Quantitative Literacy and the Likelihood of Employment Among Young Adults in the U.S.," Journal of Human Resources (1992), and "The Impact of School-to-Work Programs on Minority Youth Employment and Student Outcomes," (in W.J. Stull and N. Sanders, eds., What do we Know About School-to-Work: Research and Practice, Greenwood Press, 2003). His recent policy monograph: Education as an Engine of Economic Development: Global Experiences and Prospects for El Salvador, was published by the Fundación Salvadoreña para el Desarrollo Económico y Social (FUSADES), San Salvador, in November 2008.
His research on immigration includes the edited book volume U.S. Immigration Policy Reform in the 1980s: A Preliminary Assessment (Praeger, 1991, with I. Gang and S. Sechzer) and the paper "Undocumented Workers in the Labor Market: An Analysis of the Earnings of Legal and Illegal Mexican Immigrants in the U.S.," Journal of Population Economics (1999). He is currently in the process of editing a Handbook of Immigration Economics, to be published by Oxford University Press, New York, in 2011.
An expert on Latino populations in the United States, Dr. Rivera-Batiz has written on Dominican, Mexican, Puerto Rican and other Latino groups in New York City and in the U.S. His socioeconomic profiles of Dominican and Mexican New Yorkers have been widely disseminated in the press, including articles in the New York Times, Newsday, Daily News, The Los Angeles Times, El Diario La Prensa, and Hoy. He has also carried out research on the economy and society of Puerto Rico, including the book Island Paradox: Puerto Rico in the 1990s (Russell Sage Foundation, New York, 1996, with C. Santiago), as well as the article: "Education and Economic Development in Puerto Rico," in Barry Bosworth and Susan Collins, editors, The Puerto Rican Economy: Prospects for Growth, Brookings Institution, Washington, D.C., 2005 (with Helen F. Ladd).