Biography:
Roland Pongou joined the Brown University Department of Economics and Population Studies and Training Center in fall 2005 as a PhD student in Economics after spending two years doing research at Harvard University and the National Bureau of Economic Research. His research has focused on two main areas including (1) the determinants of child health in developing countries, and (2) the theory of social choice. As a research fellow at the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies, he conducted research on the multiple socioeconomic and environmental factors associated with childhood malnutrition in Cameroon, including the impact of the 1990s economic crisis in the country. As a research scholar at the National Bureau of Economic Research, among other things, he continued his research on child health, and wrote papers on the theory of social choice and welfare with colleagues from Cameroon, showing for instance how cooperation failure under majority rule may prevent a society from inducing an optimal social choice. He became interested in fractal geometry, which he used to study the geometry of traffic network and how it might be linked to traffic behavior, using data from the Boston Metropolitan area.

Research Focus:
One major topic I am investigating is the origin of a sex gap in mortality during childhood. In the current literature, sex gap in morbidity and mortality during childhood is explained in terms of the differences in biological make-up between male and female children and parental discrimination against a specific sex. However, recent literature in the field of biology shows that numerous pre-birth environmental factors can also determine both child sex and health, implying that the extent to which the differences in male-female biological make-up and parental bias explain sex gap in morbidity and mortality may have been overstated or understated. My goal is now to decompose the observed sex gap in mortality into the effects of pre-birth environmental factors, child biology, and parental preferences. I am using data on single and twin births from over 70 countries and 150 surveys from sub-Saharan Africa, North Africa, West Asia, Central Asia, South and East Asia, Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean. This research has numerous implications for maternal and child health, and will help in the design of effective policies that address sex and gender gaps in health, as well as skewed sex ratio at birth and young ages in some societies. Because sex ratio impacts population growth through several channels, this research also has the potential to contribute to the understanding of one dimension of population growth that has not been documented. It will also inform the debate on the contribution of biology and environment to sex difference in health.