The 2025 Berkeley Workshop in Formal Demography (BWFD) was held in-person from June 2 – 6, 2025. The theme of the 2025 BWFD workshop was the demography of fertility and reproduction. The lectures, exercises, and research talks covered some of the central concepts of formal demography, with a special focus on the demography of fertility and reproduction, including the determinants and consequences of recent fertility changes in low-fertility populations.
Day 1 – Population Dynamics (Robert Chung)
- Lecture: Matrix projection models and stable population theory (with exercises)
Day 2 — Stable Population Theory (Robert Chung)
- Lecture: Stable Population Theory, Fertility, and Projection (with exercises)
Day 3 — Models of fertility change (Joshua Goldstein and Ayesha Mahmud)
- Lecture, Part 1: Ryder’s Cohort-Period Translation (with exercises)
- Lecture, Part 2: Bongaarts-Feeney period adjustment (with exercises)
- Lecture, Part 3: Lee’s moving target model (with exercises)
- Lecture, Part 4: Goldstein and Cassidy cohort-shift model (with exercises)
Day 4 – Research Talks
- Joshua Goldstein: “Peak Population”
- Joshua Wilde: “Climate Change and Fertility”
- Martha Bailey: “What is the Case for the Second Demographic Transition?”
- Hiram Beltrán-Sánchez: “A moment-based analysis of uncertainty in ages at death: higher-order moments of the deaths distribution and life span inequality trends”
- Panel: Diana Greene Foster, Suzanne Bell, Jenna Nobles (Moderator): “Fertility and reproduction: demographic estimates for public good”
Day 5 — Research Talks
- Annette Baudisch: “Macro Level Fertility Analysis from the Child’s Perspective”
- Shripad Tuljapurkar: “How do Mortality Differences Across the U.S. Matter?”
- Ron Lee: “Reproduction and Production in a Social Context: Group Size, Reproductive Skew, and Increasing Returns”
The Berkeley Workshop in Formal Demography is funded by the NICHD R25HD083136 and sponsored by the Berkeley Population Center.