Biography
Joshua Wilde is a Research Scientist in the Population Research Center at Portland State University, and in late 2023 will begin a joint appointment as a Senior Researcher in the Nuffield Department of Population Health at the University of Oxford. He is also a guest researcher in the Laboratory of Fertility and Wellbeing at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR) – which he led until Dec 2022 – and a Research Fellow at the IZA Institute of Labor Economics. He is currently one of two Editors-in-chief of the Population and Development Review, a leading journal in the field of demography. He also co-chairs the IUSSP Panel on Covid-19, Fertility, and the Family. He was recently awarded a €2 million European Research Council (ERC) Consolidator Grant, with which he will lead the SEXRATIO project in the Leverhulme Center for Demographic Research at the University of Oxford, which aims to study the determinants of natural sex ratios at birth.
His research is in the field of Demography, Demographic Economics, and Development Economics, with an emphasis on the causes and economic effects of fertility change, at both the macro and micro levels. His focus is on four major research areas: 1) macroeconomics effects of demographic change, particularly the Demographic Dividend, 2) climate change and fertility, 3) health shocks on fertility and prenatal mortality, and 4) gender discrimination and birth outcomes.
He has published in leading journals in both the fields of economics and demography, such as the American Economic Review, the European Economic Review, Demography, and the Population and Development Review. He the co-creator of the Canning-Karra-Wilde (CKW) model, one of the leading tools used to calculate the Demographic Dividend – or the economic benefit to fertility declines on national income in high-fertility settings. He and his coauthors are also the winners of the IPUMS International Faculty Research Award for their work analyzing the effects of temperature shocks at the time of conception on long-run human capital outcomes in sub-Saharan Africa.
Before coming to the MPIDR and Portland State, Joshua was an assistant professor of Economics at the University of South Florida. He earned his PhD in economics from Brown University in 2011.