Background
De Economist TRAY, Dennis Normam was born in 1944 in Napoleon, Ohio, United States of America.
De Economist TRAY, Dennis Normam was born in 1944 in Napoleon, Ohio, United States of America.
Bachelor of Science Cornell University, 1966. Master of Science Utah State University, 1967. Master of Arts, Doctor of Philosophy University Chicago, 1972.
Association Economics, Economics, Senior Economics, Rand Corporation, Santa Monica, California, 1972-1976, 1978-1983. Association, Intematational Programs Division, Population Council, Research Research Adviser, Pakistan Institute, Institution Development Economics, Islamabad, Pakistan, 1976-1978. Chief, Living Standards Research Unit Development Research Department, World Bank, Washington, District of Columbia, since 1983.
Most of my professional career has focussed on trying to understand household behaviour and the effect of that behaviour on human resource and human capital issues, broadly defined. I have been especially interested in the consequences of household decision-making for the design and analysis of public policy. Until 1976 I worked almost exclusively on household behaviour in the context of United States policy issues, for example, fertility, education, labour supply, and welfare reform.
My work during that period is probably most closely associated with the ‘quantity verses quality’ theory of fertility determination.
At that time I left Rand temporarily to serve as Resident Research Adviser at the Pakistan Institute of Economic Development in Islamabad, Pakistan. Two years in that post critically altered my research interests and my thinking about the production of useful microeconomic research. I came to realise that the theoretical constructs with which I had analysed United States family behaviour and the questions I had addressed were often much more pertinent to conditions and problems in developing than in developed countries.
I also became concerned during that period over the fact that microeconomic research on household behaviour often had little or no perceptible effect on policy decisionmaking. This waste of intellectual and financial resources led me to concentrate on developing better ways of organising research and dissemination activities in order to serve nonacademic, policy-
oriented research consumers more effectively. Foreign me the solution entailed a shift in emphasis away from pure research to preand post-research activities — supplementing an interest in selectivity or simultaneity bias with concerns about data generation and the ‘selling’ of research and policy findings.
My interests today have to do mainly with ways of improving the value of household-level microeconomic research as a policy decision-making tool.