Interview with new faculty member John Knowles

SFU Economics welcome John Knowles back to SFU as a new faculty member. He is joined by Irene Botosaru (Toulouse/Yale), Eliav Danziger (Princeton), and Lucas Herrenbrueck (UC Davis).

We chatted with John about his move from the University of Southampton (England), and his exciting research as a macroeconomist who is currently looking at marriage and fertility.

As an alumnus of SFU (BA 1983), how does it feel to be back at SFU as a faculty member?  

Terrific! SFU is a very special place for me. I started hanging out here as a small child (my father was a faculty member in the first few years of SFU’s existence), and I remember going to children’s activities  (eg swim lessons) as well as activities that were far too deep for me (theatre, dance).

As an undergraduate I studied Economics and Biology. As a biology student, I worked for a while in a research lab here, in the early days of DNA extraction. Chemistry profs knew me too, as I once accidentally started an impressive solvent fire in the organic chemistry lab. I like to think that my SFU science background helps my economics work.

One reason that SFU was a very rich experience was the variety of extra-curricular activities, from public lectures by innovative researchers, to cinema, intramural sports and student politics. I worked on the Peak for a few years, and served a year as a student representative to the Board of Governors.

SFU today is a greatly expanded version of the campus I knew. I regret that the water tower has been eclipsed by all the high rises, even though I appreciate the conveniences that the large resident population brings (e.g. daily grocery shopping on campus!).

So far I have been really impressed by how sensible the university organization is from the point of view of a researcher and teacher; the beauty of the campus and the lecture halls. The air is a lot cleaner than it used to be (it used to be really rare to see the island), and there is more wildlife (bears, coyotes) in the forest than when I was here before.

Of course the really big change is being here as part of a research and teaching team. Having such high-quality colleagues is a true privilege.  In Economics at least, SFU as a research department stands for an eclectic approach, where everything can be challenged and anything can be tried. I am looking forward to learning all I can from this unique opportunity, and hoping to contribute as well!

Your research is extremely interesting as you tend to use macroeconomic theory to understand the impacts of our changing demographics and the issues that might occur (single parenthood, racial profiling). Why did you decide to focus in these areas?

Thank you for the compliment. I first became intensely interested in the economic approach to demographics when a macro prof in grad school said that poor women have a comparative advantage in bearing children. That statement I realize now is pure Gary Becker (Nobel Prize 1992), but at the time it struck me as such a provocative remark that I just had to work on the implications. Fortunately in my department (Rochester) there were other macro professors with interests in that direction (Jeremy Greewood, Rao Aiyagari), so I got plenty of encouragement.

The racial profiling work can also be seen as a Becker-type project, but in fact I started on it because I once received a letter from the American Civil Liberties Union or ACLU (I had just joined), claiming that the ‘driving while black’ was being treated as a crime. The question I wanted to answer was whether the fact that the police were more likely to search black drivers was evidence that the police preferred to harass black drivers. The question was more difficult than I realized, but when I mentioned it to my colleagues at Penn over lunch, one of them conjectured that a method to answer it using equilibrium analysis. Another colleague designed a way to apply this method to test for racism using data that the Supreme Court had required the Maryland State police to release. Our main result was that the very high search rate that black drivers were experiencing could have been caused by police maximizing the success rate of their searches, rather than racist preferences.

What research are you currently working on?

All of my current projects focus on marriage and / or fertility. The oldest project is about the impact of improved birth-control methods (the pil, abortion, sterilization, infertility treatment) on women’s career choices. Lately I have been working a lot on matching models of marriage, developing theories of how different types of men and women end up ‘sorting’ in to couples.

One of my papers in progress tries to explain post-war marriage/fertility booms. Another looks at the rise of extramarital fertility and the decline of marriage. 

In the future I’d like to apply this approach to understanding issues related to child development; for instance why do children of divorced parents have worse outcomes as adults than those from intact families, or why do parents in poor families seem to invest less time and effort in their children’s future. These are difficult and important questions that will take many years and many researchers to resolve, but I think the methods I work with may have something original to contribute.