[1] A long-term director of the Office of Population Research at Princeton, Coale was especially influential for his work on the demographic transition and for his leadership of the European Fertility Project.
[3] After he obtained his Bachelor's of Arts (BA) and master's degree in economics, Ansley Coale was offered a fellowship by the director of the Office of Population Research, Frank Notestein, as long as demography was a field of study.
[3] In 1947, six years after he received his master's degree, Ansley Coale obtained his Ph.D.[4] In addition to being the William Church Osborne Professor of Public Affairs Emeritus and professor of economics emeritus at Princeton University, Coale was a prolific author, publishing more than 125 books and articles on a wide variety of demographic topics.
[5] Coale's first major influential work was Population Growth and Economic Development in Low-Income Countries (1958), which he co-wrote with Edgar Hoover.
The results, which showed that slowing population growth could enhance economic development, had a major impact on public policy and set the research agenda in this field.
These model life tables both established new empirical regularities and proved invaluable in the development of later techniques for estimating mortality and fertility in populations with inaccurate or incomplete data.
The Demographic Transition, as stated by Coale, occurs when a country develops a strong economy, and within the society, low fertility and mortality will start to reflect based upon the economic standpoint.
[8] Initiated in 1963, the project resulted in the publication of nine major books summarizing the change in childbearing over a century in the 700 provinces in Europe.
[9] Toward the end of his career, Coale became interested in the population changes in China and understanding the fertility transition there as well as factors affecting the sex ratio at birth.