Amelie F. Constant

How Healthy are Immigrants?

Based on 19 European countries, Amelie Constant and co-authors find that immigrants are healthier than comparable natives when they first arrive but this advantage does not last for long. Including Israel as another important immigrant country, they find that immigrants to Israel have lower health than comparable natives and this disadvantage persists with additional years of residence in Israel.

A labor economist by training, Amelie Constant's research lies mainly in the economics of migration. She has written seventy refereed articles and also co-edited several books on the subject. Her research has been funded by several foundations and international organizations. She has been invited to talk at migration policy panels, and has written more than twenty five other reports and op-ed pieces on migration issues.

During her research visit at CESifo in May, Amelie Constant will present her latest research on the health assimilation of immigrants in Europe at a Lunchtime Seminar. She will have individual talks with other researchers at the Institute and continue working on her research on refugees in Germany.

Amelie Constant is a Visiting Research Scholar at Princeton University and the Woodrow Wilson School and the Office of Population Research. She is the President of the Society of Government Economists and serves on the board of directors of the US nonprofits AIRLEAP and SGE. She is also on the Editorial Board of Applied Economics Quarterly, an affiliated scholar at UNU-MERIT, an academic member of ATINER, a fellow of GLO and a member of the European Academy of Sciences for her outstanding achievements as a researcher. Previously, she was the Program Director of Migration at the Institute for the Study of Labor (2011–16), and the founding editor of the IZA Journal of Migration (2011–16). Before that, she was the founding director of DIWDC (2006–13), a US independent, nonprofit, economics think tank.

Ms Constant received her PhD in Labor Economics and Econometrics from Vanderbilt University in 1998, and did her post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania. She has a BA in Economics and Mathematics from the University of Athens, Greece, and an MA (DEA) in Economic Development from the University of Paris II, France. Ms Constant has fifteen years of experience in teaching undergraduate and graduate classes at Georgetown University, the George Washington University, the University of Alabama in Huntsville and Drexel University, both at economics departments and public policy schools. From 2007 to 2011 she was the Vice Dean of the Graduate School at DIW Berlin and in charge of the graduate students in Washington DC.