Michael Geruso, Ph.D.

Michael Geruso, Ph.D., is an economic demographer, public economist, and associate professor of economics at the University of Texas at Austin. His 2025 book, After the Spike: Population, Progress, and the Case for People, offers a new perspective on declining global birth rates.

From 2023 to 2024, Geruso served as a senior economist at the White House Council of Economic Advisers, where he advised on issues of health and demography. He holds bachelor’s degrees from Virginia Tech in engineering, political science, and philosophy. He earned his Ph.D. in economics from Princeton and completed postdoctoral work at Harvard prior to joining the faculty at the UT-Austin in 2014.

Since 2014, Geruso has served on the board of the Research Institute for Compassionate Economics (r.i.c.e.). He is an affiliate of the National Bureau of Economic Research and of the Population Research Center at UT-Austin. His work has been published in top peer-reviewed outlets including the American Economic Review, the Journal of Political Economy, and Demography, and has been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, NPR, Vox, The Atlantic, The Economist, and more.