Overview
Robert Schoen is a demographer and sociologist at Pennsylvania State University (Department of Sociology). His research spans demographic methods, mortality measurement, multistate life tables, and fertility. He is best known in the mortality methods literature for co-developing (with Vladimir Canudas-Romo) the ACLE (Average Cohort Life Expectancy) measure, which gives the survivorship-weighted average life expectancy of all cohorts alive in a given year.
Key Contributions / Features
- Schoen and Canudas-Romo (2005, Demographic Research): Introduced ACLE as a new aggregate mortality measure that captures the average LE of living cohorts; showed that CAL is sensitive to timing effects (nearly as much as period LE) and that ACLE is unaffected by pure tempo changes; empirical application to England/Wales, Norway, and Switzerland 1880–2000.
- Schoen (2004, Demography): "Timing Effects and the Interpretation of Period Fertility." — earlier work on tempo effects in fertility, parallel to the mortality tempo debate.
- Known for the Schoen multistate life table framework and for work on marriage and divorce tables.
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