Economic Demography

This is a master's-level survey course in economic demography: we will be concerned with the size, age structure, health, wealth, and abilities of human populations. The unifying perspective throughout the course will an economic one: aside from issues of measurement, we will be interested mainly in explaining social behaviors as the outcome of people's rational choices. Of course, theories need to explain facts, so we will spend much of our time reading empirical work that documents the relationships between the above variables - both in the cross section and over time - and understanding how the statistical evidence is constructed.