Mark Richard Rosenzweig is an economist and the Frank Altschul Professor of International Economics at Yale University, where he also directs the Economic Growth Center. Rosenzweig is one of the world's most prominent agricultural and development economists and is one of the leading scholars on the subjects of the economics of insurance and migration.
Biography Mark Rosenzweig earned a B.A. from Columbia College in 1969 as well as an M.A. and Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1971 and 1973, respectively. Following his graduation, Rosenzweig worked first as an assistant professor (1973–78) and later as an associate professor of economics at Yale University (1978–79) before moving to the University of Minnesota, where he was made a full professor in 1982 and became co-director of the university's Economic Development Center. In 1990, Rosenzweig moved further as a professor of economics to the University of Pennsylvania (1990–2001), at whose Population Studies Center he has since then been a research associate and where he became the Walter H. Annenberg Professor in the Social Sciences (2001–02). Thereafter, he briefly held the position of Mohamed Kamal Professor of Public Policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University (2002–05) and serving as director of the Center for International Development (2004–05). Finally, Rosenzweig returned to Yale University in 2005 as the Frank Altschul Professor of International Economics and has led Yale's Economic Growth Center as its director since 2006. Additionally, Rosenzweig has held visiting appointments at Princeton University, the University of Chicago, and Stanford University. Mark Rosenzweig maintains affiliations with various institutions, including NBER and has worked for several national and international agencies, including the International Monetary Fund, RAND Corporation, and the National Institutes of Health. In terms of professional service, Rosenzweig served in different roles in the American Economic Association, including on its executive committee. Moreover, he has performed editorial duties for academic journals such as the Review of Economics and Statistics, Journal of Economic Literature, World Bank Economic Review, Journal of Development Economics, and, more recently, the Pakistan Development Review and China Economic Review. Finally, Rosenzweig's research has been recognized with distinctions such as the NIH Research Service Award (1976–77), the Award for Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship in Population from the ASA (2009), the Yangtze River Scholarship (2014), and fellowships of the Econometric Society (1994), Society of Labor Economists (2006), and American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2013).
Research Mark Rosenzweig's research interests include economic development, the causes and consequences of economic development, and international migration. Geographically, his research tends to be concentrated in South Asia and more recently in China. According to IDEAS/RePEc, he ranks among the most cited 1% of economists. Moreover, he is one of the current co-editors of the Handbook of Development Economics (with Dani Rodrik) as well as the creator of the Handbook of Population and Family Economics (with Oded Stark), both of which serve as references for researchers in their respective fields. Much of Rosenzweig's research exploits natural experiments such as twin studies; nonetheless, Rosenzweig has criticized the literature of natural experiments for often not making explicit the set of behavioral, market and technological assumptions necessary to justify the studies' interpretations of estimates, resulting in findings that are sometimes highly sensitive to relaxing some of these assumptions.
The fertility decisions of rural households Since the mid-1970s, much of Rosenzweig's research has focused on family economics, including fertility and intra-household decisions. Early research conducted by Rosenzweig and Robert Evenson underlines the importance of the economic contributions of children to households in rural India: in particular, they find fertility and child labour to increase in the financial returns to child labour and to decrease in the wage rates of adult women. In further work with Kenneth Wolpin, Rosenzweig studied how female labour supply over the life-cycle is affected by fertility; using twins in women's first pregnancies as an unanticipated and thus exogenous variation in fertility, they find that the ratio of births to pregnancies has no effect on women's lifetime labour supply. In a similar vein, Rosenzweig and Wolpin demonstrate how twins can be used to test the hypothesis of a tradeoff between fertility and the "quality" of a household's offspring.
… excerpt ends here. Continue reading the full article.
