He taught at the University of Chicago from 1983 to 1986, where he worked with Dr. Donald Bogue as an associate director of the Social Development Center.
His early work focused on the fertility transition in the Mormon population in collaboration with Lee L. Bean and Geraldine Mineau, among others.
His historical work has included several international populations and more recently has focused upon mortality in the Connecticut River Valley of Massachusetts.
He is the co-author of several books including Adaptation and Innovation: Fertility on the Frontier (1990, with Lee L. Bean and Geraldine P. Mineau), The Population of the United States (1997, with Richard Barrett and Donald Bogue), Readings in Population Methodology (1993, with Donald Bogue and Eduardo Arriaga co-editors), Demography: The Study of Human Population (2001, with David Yaukey and 2007 with David Yaukey and Jennifer Lundquist) and Public Sociology: Michael Buroway and his critics (2006, with Dan Clawson, Robert Zussman, Michael Buroway, Joya Misra, Naomi Gerstel and Randall Stokes).
His most cited research articles include Hazardous Waste Facilities: " Environmental Equity" Issues in Metropolitan Areas (1994), A longitudinal analysis of environmental equity in communities with hazardous waste facilities (1996), Sexual harassment: Organizational context and diffuse status (1987), Intergenerational transmission of relative fertility and life course patterns (1987), Birth spacing and fertility limitation: A behavioral analysis of a nineteenth century frontier population (1985), Demographics of dumping II: A national environmental equity survey and the distribution of hazardous materials handlers (2000), Grammars of death: An analysis of nineteenth-century literal causes of death from the age of miasmas to germ theory (2004), and Determination of free Bisphenol A (BPA) concentrations in breast milk of US women using a sensitive LC/MS/MS method (2014).