Welcome

The Formal Demography Working Group aims to bring together formal demography scholars and those interested in formal demography to discuss recent and classic work, brainstorm new ideas, and to foster new collaborations. We meet virtually each month with meetings tentatively scheduled for the last Friday in every month. Our specific aims are to:

1. Bring an international community of scholars together with formal demography as the focus
2. Create a supportive and inclusive environment to learn, and encourage people to work with formal methods
3. Discuss the past, present and future of formal demography

We aim to run thematic meetings on research, training, and forums. More details can be found here

Sign-up

If you would like to be included on the mailing list sign up here.

Register interest to present

If you are interested in presenting at a future meeting, fill out this form.

Next meeting

Title: ‘My favorite formal demography paper: The Population Momentum of Preston & Guillot (1997, Genus)’

Time: Friday 28 January at 1pm ET. Sign up above to get the Zoom link.

Roland Rau (Professor of Demography at the University of Rostock and Research Fellow, MPIDR) will discuss his favorite formal demography paper:

Preston, S.H. and Guillot, M., 1997. Population dynamics in an age of declining fertility. Genus, pp.15-31.

We may even have some special guests join in the discussion!

Previous meeting’s materials

• October 2021: Kick-off, Friday 29 October at 11am ET
  • Recording
  • Monica’s slides
  • Vanessa’s Slides
• December 2021: Decomposition methods, Friday 3 December at 10am ET. Tim Riffe on decomposition methods and how to implement them in R
  • Recording
  • Tim’s slides
  • Tim’s code and materials

Links

• Demographic Research: Special Collection on Formal Relationships
• Berkeley Formal Demography Workshop 2021
• Ron Lee’s essay ‘Demography Abandons its Core’
• Here is a map of locations/affiliations of sign-ups to date. We are very international!
• (Past) Here is a list of formal demography presentations at IUSSP 2021.

Contact

This working group is organized by Vanessa Di Lego (Vienna Institute of Demography), Ryohei Mogi (University of Oxford), and Monica Alexander (University of Toronto). It is still a very new idea and we are always open to suggestions and feedback.