Joshua Wilde is a Senior Researcher jointly in the Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science in the Demographic Science Unit in the Nuffield Department of Population Health at the University of Oxford, and at the Population Research Center at Portland State University. He is also an affiliated researcher in the Laboratory of Fertility and Wellbeing at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR).

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 (e.g., the Demographic Dividend and the Gender Dividend), 2) climate change and fertility, 3) health shocks and fertility and prenatal mortality, and 4) gender discrimination and birth outcomes.

He has served the research community in various leadership roles. He is currently one of two Editors of the Population and Development Review, a leading journal in the field of demography. He was recently awarded a $2.1 million European Research Council Consolidator Grant which was converted into a UKRI Frontier research grant to lead the SEXRATIO project at Oxford. He also co-chairs the IUSSP Panel on Covid-19, Fertility, and the Family. He previously led the Laboratory of Fertility and Well-Being at MPIDR.

Joshua’s work has been influential. He has published in high quality 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. In addition, he has contributed to several book chapters, including in the Oxford Handbook of Health Economics and the African Development Forum of the World Bank. He and his coauthors are the winner 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. He is also the co-creator of the Canning-Karra-Wilde (CKW) model, one of the leading tools used to calculate the Demographic Dividend – the economic benefit to fertility declines on national income in high-fertility settings. He regularly consults for multilateral organizations such the World Bank and the United Nations.

Before his current roles at Oxford, Portland State, and MPIDR, Joshua was an assistant professor of Economics at the University of South Florida. He earned his PhD in economics from Brown University in 2011.