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Kasey Buckles

Economics

Office
3052 Jenkins and Nanovic Halls
Notre Dame, IN 46556
Phone
574-631-6210
Email
kbuckles@nd.edu

Stepan Family College Professor of Economics

  • Economics of the family
  • Economic demography
  • Health economics
  • Labor economics
  • Opioid related research

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Buckles in the News

Drops among Hispanic, white and Black teenagers accounted for 37 percent of the national birthrate decline between 2007, when the rate started to go down, and 2019, according to calculations by Melissa Kearney, an economist at the University of Notre Dame, and her colleagues.

Researchers have pointed to several possible explanations. The decline coincided with the introduction of the smartphone, which rapidly became a tool for both social connection and isolation, even a substitute for sex, said Kasey Buckles, an economist at Notre Dame.

Family economist Kasey Buckles also spoke about the practical way religion impacts fertility. "If young people are less likely to be a part of faith communities for whatever reason, then they may also find it too costly to have children without that support—especially if other institutions like neighborhoods or public education are also weak," said Buckles, a professor of economics and gender studies at Indiana's University of Notre Dame.

"One of the main reasons people worry about a decline in fertility is because it makes it more difficult to sustain social programs like Social Security, when you have many fewer workers for each beneficiary," Kasey Buckles, an economics professor at the University of Notre Dame, told Newsweek.

Kasey Buckles, an economics professor at Notre Dame, said that is a “huge” decline. 

“Workers generate innovation and ideas — they invent things,” said Kasey Buckles, an economics professor at the University of Notre Dame. “When you have a dwindling working-age population, you have fewer people doing that.”

Kasey Buckles is an associate professor of Economics at the University of Notre Dame, a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a research fellow at the IZA Institute for Labor Economics.

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All that contributes to America’s record-low birthrates, says Notre Dame economics professor Kasey Buckles, but she’s not ready to call it a crisis yet.

KQED

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Kasey Buckles, associate professor of economics and concurrent professor of gender studies, University of Notre Dame.

“Children are future productive members of society, and their total benefit to society is greater than their benefit to their parents alone,” said Kasey Buckles, an economist at Notre Dame.

Kasey Buckles, an associate professor of economics at the University of Notre Dame, told Insider to expect to see other longer-term effects in the next several years, adding that women often struggle to find "on-ramps" back into their careers after stepping out of the workforce. 

After that, researchers like University of Notre Dame economics professor Kasey Buckles expect to see fertility to level off or decline.