Faculty Info
Name: Francesc Ortega
“We encourage students to enroll in our department’s honors seminar and write an original thesis. By working closely with our faculty in a small setting we are able to help students get started in conducting rigorous quantitative research.”
– Francesc Ortega
Past Profiles
Francesc Ortega, the Dina Axelrad Perry Professor of Economics, is a prolific scholar of both immigration and climate change, two topics very close to home for New Yorkers. Describing himself as pragmatic and data-driven, he analyzes big data sets that can illuminate real-world patterns and, by extension, paths for public policy.
By exploring what undocumented workers added to the U.S. economy, Ortega was able to quantify their workforce contribution at “about 3% of GDP, which is not a small chunk.” In debates over DACA and the DREAM Act, he saw a need for cost-benefit analysis. Research by Ortega and his collaborators (including Amy Hsin in Sociology and Ryan Edwards at University of California, San Francisco) has shown that by offering legal work, DACA raised Dreamers’ annual economic contribution to society by $7,000, but also distorted their life decisions: Because their earnings are crucial to their families’ financial survival, these young people chose temporarily legal jobs over college. He estimates that passage of the DREAM Act would instead encourage them to finish college, which would have a lasting positive effect on their careers and roughly double their economic contribution to society.
Ortega has also become interested in climate change or more precisely, the economic impacts and policy implications of sealevel rise for coastal cities, especially New York. Since Hurricane Sandy, he and Süleyman Taspinar (Economics) have determined that homes in affected areas have lost value—indications that today’s housing market reveals growing awareness of climate change. Ortega’s current research concerns the National Flood Insurance Program, which has “contributed to getting too many people to choose to live too close to the water.” He is studying businesses in flood zones, too.
A native of Spain, Ortega completed his BA at the University of Barcelona, MA at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, and PhD at New York University. A Queens College faculty member since 2012, he is intent on not only teaching his students the discipline, but also helping them develop a core competence of their own, with a research portfolio to show graduate schools and employers. “If you’ve developed your own research and you’ve spent a semester working with a professor here on that topic, you’re going to know more about that than the person interviewing you,” he observes. “That’s going to look very good.”