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Robert A. Pollak, Ph.D., the Hernreich Distinguished Professor of Economics in the College of Arts & Sciences and the John M. Olin School of Business, has received the prestigious Mindel C. Sheps Award, sponsored by the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and the Population Association of America.
The award, which carries a $5,000 cash prize, is given every two years for outstanding contributions to mathematical demography and related fields.
Among demographers, Pollak is best known for solving demography's long-standing "two-sex problem." He developed a well-specified nonlinear model that, by relaxing the assumption that women's fertility rates are fixed, allows the number of marriages (and thus births) to depend on the number and ages of men as well as women. Unlike traditional models, which consider women only, Pollak's model also considers men and allows for temporary imbalances between the female and male populations of marriageable age.
The Sheps Award also recognized Pollak's other work on fertility, investment in human capital and the role of bargaining in determining resource allocation within families.
The award commemorates the life and work of Mindel Sheps, a woman who pioneered in the application of mathematics to the analysis of human reproduction.
Pollak is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and recently received a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He also co-chairs the interdisciplinary Network on the Family and Economy, funded by a grant to the University from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
