Diane Macunovich received her Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Southern California in 1989, after receiving her undergraduate degree from M.I.T. in 1966 and then working for seventeen years as an economic and demographic consultant in the U.S., U.K., Iran and Canada. She lived and worked for eight years in England, and nine years in Canada before returning to school to get her PhD at USC, and has recently joined the faculty of Economics at the University of Redlands in Redlands, CA after ten years at Williams College in Massachusetts and four years at Barnard College, Columbia University in NYC.

She specializes in research on economic and demographic feedback effects: how population growth affects the economy, and how economic conditions affect population growth. Much of her work is presented in her recent book Birth Quake: the Baby Boom and Its Aftershocks (University of Chicago Press, 2002).

She joined IZA as a Research Fellow in July 2003.