Andy Mason is a Professor of Economics at the University of Hawaii at Manoa and Senior Fellow at the East-West Center. He is a leading economic demographer specializing in population and economic development, saving, formal demography, the economics of aging, and intergenerational transfers. He co-directs the large international National Transfer Accounts (NTA) project. Andy has written or edited thirteen books and many journal articles and book chapters. He earned his BA at George Washington University in 1969 with Special Honors, and his MA and PhD in Economics at the University of Michigan where he won the Taylor Prize in Economic Theory. Andy is married to Janet Mason and has two daughters, Jenny and Malia. He and Janet enjoy paddling outrigger canoes and watching the sun set over the Pacific, occasionally accompanied by a green flash.
Andy did early work on the influence of demography on saving behavior at both the individual and the aggregate level. This work included a simple and elegant formal treatment of the effect of economic growth on aggregate saving rates, deriving an analytic result, the “variable rate of growth effect”, which had a major impact on research in the field at a time when there were many cross-national analyses of aggregate saving rates. In other work in formal economic demography, Andy used dynamic programming to analyze the hypothetical effects of sex preselection with biased technology on population sex ratios. In later work in formal demography he developed methods for modeling and projecting households. Andy has also worked extensively on national saving in relation to population change including mortality and population age distribution. Over the past fifteen years, Andy has focused on the National Transfer Accounts project, developing much of its methodology and many applications including dynamic theory. He was a lead author of the NTA book Population and the Generational Economy: A Global Perspective (2011) and co-drafted the United Nations National Transfer Accounts Manual: Measuring and Analyzing the Generational Economy (2013). His current emphasis within NTA is on its use for long term fiscal projections.