Dietrich Vollrath

Poor Megacities

Today the largest cities in the world lie mainly in relatively poor countries. Dietrich Vollrath, together with Remi Jedwab, have investigated one aspect of the origin of poor megacities. Their hypothesis is that the urban mortality transition in the 1940s and 1950s, which greatly lowered death rates in poor urban areas, contributed to the spread of poor megacities by creating slums that were one of the few areas that could absorb the surge in population growth. Poor megacities continue to grow in size but not in living standards because their poverty keeps population growth high.

While at CESifo, Mr Vollrath hopes to advance two projects. The first, with Remi Jedwab of George Washington University, relates to the demographic composition of poor mega-cities both historically and today. They have collected data that shows how the age structure of large developing cities today is far more concentrated in younger ages (less than 15), and that this contrasts greatly with historical cities, which were populated mainly by prime working age adults. The second project is in an earlier stage, but relates to the nutrition quality of agricultural output, focusing on the cognitive consequences of certain nutrition deficiencies. Specifically, iodine, zinc and certain fatty acids are quite important to human cognitive development, but there are severe deficiencies in these nutrients across different diets in the world. The project employs existing data on agricultural output, combined with dietetic data on how these raw foods translate to nutrient concentrations to determine if there are any patterns in human capital accumulation across cultures or countries.

Dietrich Vollrath is currently an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Houston. He joined UH in 2005, directly after graduating with a PhD from Brown University, where he worked with Oded Galor and David Weil as his main advisors. Currently he serves as an associate editor with the Journal of Development Economics and is a co-editor of Economic Inquiry. He also writes the Growth Economics Blog (growthecon.com), which touches on topics related to growth in general.