JP Conte and Paola Sapienza Are Building a Research Infrastructure for Evidence-Based Immigration Study
Most efforts to study immigration policy focus on its legal or social dimensions. The J-P Conte Initiative on Immigration, established at the Hoover Institution in October 2024 and funded by JP Conte, a managing partner and member of Hoover’s Board of Overseers, occupies different ground: it focuses specifically on the economics of immigration — what it produces, what it costs, and how various policy choices affect those outcomes at a systemic level.
The initiative’s academic work is led by Paola Sapienza, who holds the inaugural J-P Conte Family Senior Fellowship at Hoover and co-directs the initiative alongside fellow Hoover senior fellow Stephen Haber. Sapienza previously served as a finance professor at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management for more than 25 years, and her research spans corporate governance, financial development, and political economy. She maintains affiliations with the National Bureau of Economic Research and the Center for Economic Policy Research.
The Design of the Research Program
The initiative is structured to support original empirical research on immigration’s economic effects, host conferences that bring that research into contact with practitioners and policymakers, and build a cumulative body of evidence that can inform decisions about high-skill immigration pathways, labor mobility, and related questions. The January 22, 2026 Immigration Policy and the Economics of Innovation conference was the initiative’s second annual gathering — the first was held in October and November 2024.
Sapienza delivered opening remarks at both conferences. Her role is not purely administrative; she is the intellectual anchor of the research agenda, selecting the papers to be presented, framing the questions the initiative seeks to answer, and connecting the findings to the broader literature on economic growth and competitiveness. Her view, as she has stated it publicly, is that immigration’s nuances have significant implications for policy formation — and that those nuances can only be understood through rigorous empirical work.
What JP Conte Looks for in the Research
JP Conte has been clear about what he wants the initiative to produce: evidence that advances the collective understanding of immigration’s impacts rather than advocacy for a predetermined conclusion. His philanthropy in this area is an extension of principles he has applied throughout his career — a preference for analysis over assumption, and for outcomes that can be verified rather than merely asserted.
At the January 2026 conference, he characterized the work in terms of what it aims to demonstrate: that immigration and innovation are inseparable aspects of American economic strength. “The beauty of America is immigration and innovation,” he told attendees. “And immigration is key to that innovation.” For JP Conte, the research infrastructure that he and Sapienza are building together is meant to give that claim an empirical foundation solid enough to hold up in any policy conversation.
