Endowed Chair Profile: Chad Sparber

By Rebecca Taurisano October 14, 2024

With another presidential election looming this November, immigration and the economy are at the forefront of our national civil discourse — W. Bradford Wiley Chair in International Economics and Lampert Institute Director Chad Sparber studies both.

A named chair is the highest academic award that the University can bestow on a faculty member. When established in 1987, the W. Bradford Wiley Chair in International Economics was just Colgate’s 14th endowed chair. The Wiley Chair kicked off a wave of faculty support in the late 1980s and ʼ90s that helped lay the foundation for an institutional priority that continues today. Through the Campaign for the Third Century, Colgate seeks to significantly increase the number of endowed chairs, which provide not only the foundation of the chair holders’ salaries, but also offer dedicated funds to deepen and enhance their research and teaching efforts, like that of Professor Sparber.

His research examines the economic consequences of immigration and endeavors to understand the impact of immigration policy changes made by the U.S. government. Sparber has been published in the Review of Economics and Statistics, the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, the Journal of Labor Economics, European Economic Review, the Journal of Urban Economics, and the Journal of Development Economics. His findings have been discussed in the Economic Report to the President and cited by the Council of Economic Advisors, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and NPR, and he has testified before the U.S. Senate.

“There are many unintended consequences of immigration on the economy,” Sparber says. “It is my job to ask the questions and think about this issue in ways that others generally don’t.”

Sparber is a first-generation college student. He grew up in a working-class family in Washington State, raised by a police officer father and a bank teller mother, and his parents earned associate degrees, after serving in the U.S Army. “They were not super familiar with a four-year college experience and certainly not the PhD path,” says Sparber, who received his bachelor of arts in economics from Western Washington University in 2000.

With an interest in political science, but possessing strong mathematical skills, Sparber took an economics class in the spring semester of his first year. “I fell in love with economics because we answer politically oriented questions using mathematical tools,” he says. “Some of the thought processes are similar to how I approach problems, so I was instantly drawn to the field.”

Thanks to the encouragement from his accounting professor Stephen Senge, Sparber received a PhD in economics from the University of California–Davis in 2006. In his first year at UC–Davis, he took a macroeconomics course taught by Giovanni Peri. This introduction started a chain of professional collaboration that continues to pay dividends to this day, with the pair co-authoring 10 papers to date.

Economic Impacts of Immigration Policy

Sparber collaborated with Peri on their paper “Task Specialization, Immigration, and Wages” published in the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics in July 2009. The paper grapples with the question: Do immigrants take American jobs?

“Immigrants tend to specialize in manual skills, so when immigrants come in, Americans in labor jobs respond to that by doing more communication-intense work,” he explains. “An American worker will go from a landscaper to a landscaping manager. That occupational adjustment protects Americans from job loss.” That 2009 paper was quoted in Paul Krugman’s New York Times opinion piece “Trump’s Cynical Attempt to Pit Recent Immigrants Against Black Americans” last July. “Even after all these years, that paper has resonance and influence,” says Sparber.

In 2015 Sparber received a National Science Foundation grant to support his research on the H-1B visa program, the visa used by many college-educated foreign workers in our country. Recently his paper “Buying Lottery Tickets for Foreign Workers: Lost Quota Rents Induced by H-1B Policy,” co-authored by Colgate colleague Rishi Sharma, was accepted for publication in the Journal of International Economics. They discuss how the United States currently allocates H-1B status through a random lottery, which causes firms to search for far more workers than they can actually hire. In the paper, they posit that we would be better off letting firms hire the workers for whom they are willing to pay.

“We have a lot of international students at Colgate hoping to work here after graduation and contribute to the American economy,” says Sparber. “Currently, we allocate H-1B status randomly when we should be trying to attract the best and the brightest. There is a lot of waste in random allocation.”

For example, if Microsoft wants to hire 500 foreign-born workers, but it has a one in three chance of winning the visa lottery, it is going to extend 1,500 offers to hit the target. “They are extending offers to far more people than they could potentially hire, and those searches have massive costs,” he says. “They are wasting money that could be directed elsewhere.”

On February 25, 2016, Sparber testified before the Senate Subcommittee on Immigration and the National Interest on the significance of foreign-born STEM workers on native-born job opportunities and the role of the H-1B Visa program in technology development and U.S. job creation. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) was head of the subcommittee at the time, and Sparber met with Chuck Schumer (D-NY), who had invited him to testify, and Tom Tillis (R-NC) during the experience. “It was definitely a career highlight,” he says. “I’m happy to have been able to talk to political leaders on both sides of the aisle about this issue.

Interdisciplinary Teaching

Former economics department chair (2014–17) and three-time leader of the London Economics Study Group (2009, 2013, 2017), Sparber teaches courses on the economics of immigration, international economics, the economics of race and ethnicity, and urban economics. He is also an external research fellow at the Centre for Research and Analysis of Migration at University College London and the IZA, Institute of Labor Economics in Germany.

Sparber’s favorite course to teach is ECON 249: International Economics. The course analyzes the flow of goods, capital, and labor across international borders and it is required for international relations majors. “The stereotypical international relations major is very good at geopolitical affairs but may have an economics or quantitative phobia," Sparber says. "Part of my job is to help them get over that anxiety and realize that they can understand economics better than they do. By improving those quantitative skills, they can understand the political issues they are interested in.”

In the spring, he offered ECON 249 as an extended study course linked with Professor Morgan Davies’ ENGL 302: Literature of the Early Middle Ages. Drawing on multiple disciplines, the program built a more complete understanding of the United Kingdom and Ireland as unique but interconnected locales. ENGL 302 formed the basis for the program’s historical and cultural content, and ECON 249 examined the underlying forces affecting international economic relations.

Sparber and Davies spent two weeks traveling with 13 Colgate students in these countries with excursions to sites with both historical and modern significance: Canterbury Cathedral, Sutton Hoo, Knowth, Glendalough, the offices of the Economist, the Brazilian Embassy, the Central Bank of Ireland, and IDA Ireland. After their travel, some students returned for summer internships with the connections they made during the course.

A Focus on Civil Discourse

Since 2021 Sparber has been a panelist on WCNY’s The Ivory Tower, a roundtable discussion of current events with representatives from central New York institutions of higher education. He offers one of the more conservative perspectives during his appearances on the panel. “It is a lot of preparation,” he says. “I need to make sure I have facts and figures to defend my position, but I enjoy doing it.”

Sparber has recently been named the director of the Lampert Institute for Civic and Global Affairs. The Lampert Institute was created in 2008 thanks to the generosity of Edgar Lampert ʼ62, and its mission is to teach students to apply the fundamental tools of a liberal arts education to the most significant current policy issues. Sparber also directs a forum on economic freedom for Colgate’s Center for Freedom and Western Civilization, which seeks to promote intellectual diversity and discourse on campus.

This fall the Lampert Institute is co-sponsoring The Road to the White House: Colgate’s 2024 Election Series, a three-part speaker series with such notable guests as Donna Brazile, former Democratic National Committee chair; Michael Steele, former Republican National Committee chair; Karl Rove, senior advisor and deputy chief of staff to President George W. Bush; Maureen Dowd, New York Times columnist; and Carl Hulse, New York Times chief Washington correspondent.

“The kind of programming Lampert offers is policy analysis,” says Sparber. “There is an ‘agree to disagree’ kind of element to it with no ideological agenda. The speakers we bring in are really powerful academics, media types, and think-tank individuals. I am excited about continuing that tradition."