Pollak began his academic career at the University of Pennsylvania, where he was named Charles and William Day Professor of Economics and Social Science in 1983. He was on the faculty of the University of Washington in Seattle from 1990 to 1995. His research interests include the economics of the family and demography as well as consumer demand analysis, environmental policy, and the theory of the cost-of-living index.- Prof. Pollak is the author of more than 70 articles, and three books:
- The Theory of the Cost-of-Living Index, Oxford University Press, 1989
- Demand System Specification and Estimation, (joint with Terence J. Wales), Oxford University Press, 1992
- From Parent to Child: Intrahousehold Allocations and Intergenerational Relations in the United States, (joint with Jere R. Behrman and Paul Taubman), University of Chicago Press, 1995
Pollak served as editor of the International Economic Review from 1976 to 1985. He has also served on the editorial boards of The Review of Economics and Statistics, Demography, The Journal of Economic Literature, Feminist Economics, Review of Economics of the Household, and as Adviser in Economics to Oxford University Press. He has been awarded 25 research grants, including 12 from the National Science Foundation (Principal Investigator on 10) and 6 from the National Institutes of Health (Principal Investigator on 3), and grants from the Rockefeller Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation. A fellow of the Econometric Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, Pollak has served as a consultant to the U. S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, has testified before the Senate Committee on Finance on the Consumer Price Index, and served on the National Academy of Sciences/Committee on the National Statistics panel on Cost-of-Living Indexes. He has served as Senior Consultant to the Economics Initiative of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Pollak currently co-chairs the MacArthur Foundation Network on the Family and the Economy, an interdisciplinary group of economists, sociologists, and developmental psychologists studying the functioning of families. Pollak was awarded a Fellowship for 1999-2000 by the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. In 2000 Pollak received the Mindel C. Sheps Award for mathematical demography from the Population Association of America. He was President of the Midwest Economics Association in 2002-2003. |
