Thesis: Three Essays on the Demographic Analysis of Deaths of Despair and the Intergenerational Transmission of Longevity: Identifying Trends, Noise, and Narratives in Population Science
Supervisors: Professor Ridhi Kashyap and Professor Jennifer Beam Dowd
Haohao is a DPhil student in Sociology with a strong interest in demography and population science. He is passionate about uncovering the underlying mechanisms of human society by analysing empirical data.
Haohao is also affiliated with the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research and worked as a Research Assistant within the Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science. Haohao's research is generously supported by the Clarendon Fund and Nuffield College.
His thesis critically examines recent demographic narratives using empirical analysis rather than theory-building. The first two chapters challenge the “deaths of despair” hypothesis (Case & Deaton) by constructing a sequence-based measure of despair-related deaths and exploring how life-trajectory instability contributes to educational mortality gaps in the United States.
The third chapter analyses intergenerational longevity transmission in Europe (1700–1900), distinguishing structural mobility from exchange mobility using genealogical data.
Research Interests: Social demography, social epidemiology, analytical sociology, applied machine learning, causal inference, social data science
Previous Education: BSc Social Sciences with Quantitative Methods, University College London; MPhil Sociology and Demography, University of Oxford
