As part of the Brown Bag Lunch series, the International Economics Department at the Graduate Institute is pleased to invite you to a public talk given by Maria Kamran, PhD Researcher in International Economics, who will present her paper and work.

Optimal Menopause - Theory and Empirics

by Maria Kamran

Abstract: This paper investigates evolutionary explanations for menopause in humans. It constructs a theoretical model to understand whether menopause is optimal in maximizing the expected number of surviving offspring. This question is confronted by using unique two approaches, where the first is a country-year analysis using a novel dataset constructed from medical studies. This exercise gives a general indication of the correlation direction between the age of menopause and various macroeconomic indicators including GDP, life expectancy and risk of maternal death. The second approach adopts case-study methodology to analyze the problem. Under this methodology, Pakistan rural household survey is used to empirically test the grandmother hypothesis of menopause. The preliminary results confirm the grandmother hypothesis - that benefits from ceasing reproduction early lead menopausal women to invest efforts in reproductive attempts of their offspring.