Demography

Working on a paper for presentation at a conference this summer and chair work took much of this week away from my blogging. Oh and a revise and resubmit. That is not helping either. I keep getting excited by the paper though. It is a continuation of a master’s thesis I supervised and the former student, now co-author, really likes the topic too. We are looking at fertility and the impact of various employment classifications for women and their partners. We have around 2.2 million observations so if a variable is not significant we know it is NOT significant. 

Continue reading Fertility and Employment-Current Research

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I was thinking about North Dakota and the population shifts and changes of the the last few years. The economics of the state are so clearly connected to the population changes, which are clearly connected to the economic changes in the state too. There really is an intense and important feedback relationship between population and economics in this state in particular.

Continue reading North Dakota Population Change, Nature v. Nurture

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The simple fact is that pensions are still in the news all the time. You might think they settled down after the Detroit pension debacle but do a quick Google News search on pensions and you will see that teacher pensions in multiple states are in the news, Park District employees in Chicago won a court case regarding pensions, and I tweeted a few days ago an article pointing out the problems with a multi-company pension that seemed to be teetering on the brink. This is not a rant against workers pensions though. Pensions are an important part of the negotiated compensation package between workers and employers. 

Continue reading The Pension Problem, yet again

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