Diane J Macunovich

Diane Macunovich received her Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Southern California in 1989, after receiving her undergraduate degree from M.I.T. in 1966 and then working for seventeen years as an economic and demographic consultant in the U.S., U.K., Iran and Canada. She specializes in research on economic and demographic feedback effects: how population growth affects the economy, and how economic conditions affect population growth. Much of her work is presented in her book Birth Quake: the Baby Boom and Its Aftershocks (University of Chicago Press, 2002). She lived and worked for eight years in England, and nine years in Canada, before returning to school to get her PhD at USC, and came to the University of Redlands after ten years at Williams College in Massachusetts and four years at Barnard College, Columbia University in NYC.

Most ofher work focuses on the effects of the post WWII baby boom on changing relative cohort size (the number of young adults relative to the number of prime age adults), and the effects of that on material aspirations, (the income of young adultsrelative to their aspirations as measured by parental income), and the effects of that in turn on marriage, fertility, and male and female labor force participation. In addition, that work looks at economic impacts of the baby boom – on things such as wages, unemployment, patterns of retirement, and GDP growth. Her most recent work focuses on demographic factors – changing age structure – behind the incidence of recessions.