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Assistant Professor of Economics
Faculty Affiliate, Initiative in Population Research
Faculty Affiliate, Center for Human Resource Research
The Ohio State University
Faculty Research Fellow, National Bureau of Economic Research
410 Arps Hall
1945 North High Street
Columbus, Ohio 43210
Electronic Mail: logan dot 155 at osu dot edu
About Me
I am an economist who specializes in economic history, economic demography, and biodemography. I also do work that intersects with health economics, applied econometrics, applied microeconomics and development economics. My research agenda covers three general areas:
(1) Historical Living Standards. This includes analysis of nutritional well-being, household allocation of resources, economies of scale in the household, and comparative measures of living standards over time. I am currently branching out to work that looks at childhood health in the past and at various aspects of economic change in the last two centuries. Most of my historical work uses historical household surveys, but also includes some new data to look at topics such as the returns to education in the early twentieth century.
(2) Biodemography. In this area I am currently looking at the modeling of physiological capital, estimating the rate of transmission of physiological capital (mother to child) in the twentieth century, and looking at the convergence in biomarkers between groups in the last two hundred years. In particular, most of my work in this area looks at longitudinal sources to measure the extent and consequences of human physiological change, with an eye towards projecting future trends in health, mortality and morbidity. To that end, I am also investigating the use of cohort BMI and height in mortality forecasting models.
(3) Applied Demography. My largest project in this area looks at the phenomenon of dowries in South Asia with my co-author Raj Arunachalam. So far, we have looked at the different motivations for dowries, and we have found some evidence for heterogeneity in dowry motives. We are also looking at the issue of dowry inflation and the role that family planning programs have on dowries in this part of the world. In addition, I am also returning to work that looks at the role of human capital in the migration of African Americans before World War I.