the demographic transition and the emergence of sustained economic growth the demographic transition that swept the world in the course of the last century has been identified as one of the prime forces in the transition from stagnation to growth the unprecedented increase in population growth during the early stages of industrialization was ultimately reversed and the demographic transition brought about a significant reduction in fertility rates and population growth in various regions of the world enabling economies to convert a larger share of the fruits of factor accumulation and technological progress into growth of income per capita this paper examines various mechanisms that have been proposed as possible triggers for the demographic transition assessing their empirical validity and their potential role in the transition from stagnation to growth jel o11 o14 o33 o40 j11 j13

development fertility and childbearing age a unified growth theory during the last two centuries fertility has exhibited in industrialized economies two distinct trends the cohort total fertility rate follows a decreasing pattern while the cohort average age at motherhood exhibits a u shaped pattern this paper proposes a unified growth theory aimed at rationalizing those two demographic stylized facts we develop a three period olg model with two periods of fertility and show how a traditional economy where individuals do not invest in higher education and where income rises push towards advancing births can progressively converge towards a modern economy where individuals invest in higher education and where income rises encourage postponing births our findings are illustrated numerically by replicating the dynamics of the quantum and the tempo of births for swedish cohorts born between 1876 and 1966

a model of urban demography this study develops an overlapping generations model that involves the endogenous determination of demographic and city structure to fully analyze the social and natural changes in city populations we provide conditions under which the model exhibits the spatial features of demography observed in urban areas city centres have a lower total fertility rate than suburbs and larger cities have a lower total fertility rate than smaller cities through calibration we also show that spatial factors have a significant impact on demographic characteristics and city growth resume un modele de demographie urbaine cette etude developpe un modele de generations qui se chevauchent qui genere la determination endogene de la demographie et de la structure urbaine pour analyser pleinement les changements sociaux et culturels des populations urbaines on presente les conditions qui font que le modele genere les caracteristiques spatiales de la demographie observee dans les zones urbaines le centre ville avec un taux de fecondite plus faible que les banlieues et les grandes villes arborant une fecondite totale plus faible que les petites villes a l aide de calibration on montre que les facteurs spatiaux ont un impact significatif sur les caracteristiques demographiques et la croissance des villes

urbanization fertility and child education in sub saharan africa abstract using individual level survey data we show that the urbanization process in today s sub saharan africa is associated with the fertility transition and increased investment in child education this is consistent with the experience of the western economies during their transition from a post malthusian towards a modern growth regime the use of individual level data allows us to analyze structural rural urban differences holding constant age and regional characteristics which are potentially confounding factors in regional and country level regressions

cheap children and the persistence of poverty this paper develops a theory of fertility that offers an explanation for the persistence of poverty within and across countries if educated individuals have a comparative advantage in raising educated children then parental fertility choice is shown to give rise to a poverty trap in which the poor choose high fertility rates with low investment in child quality moreover the impact of child quality choice on economic performance is amplified by the diluting effect of higher fertility on physical capital accumulation the theory proposes insights regarding the effects of inequality globalisation and life expectancy on economic growth and demographic transitions this paper develops a theory of fertility and child educational choice that offers an explanation for the persistence of poverty within and across countries the joint determination of the quality education and quantity of children in a household is studied under the key assumption that individuals productivity as teachers increases with their own human capital in contrast the minimum time cost associated with raising a child regardless of the child s quality the quantity cost is not affected by parental education as a result the price of child quantity relative to the price of child quality increases with individuals wages in particular for low wage individuals for whom the opportunity cost of time is low children of minimal quality are cheap this assumption therefore generates a comparative advantage for the poor in child quantity whereas high wage educated individuals have a comparative advantage in raising quality children consistent with the well known evidence poor households thus choose relatively high fertility rates with relatively low investment in their offspring s education and therefore their offspring are poor as well in contrast high income families choose low fertility rates with high investment in education and therefore high income persists in the dynasty evidence from the us provided by hanushek 1992 suggests that a trade off between quantity and quality of children does indeed exist hanushek argues that movements in family size could explain over half the variance in some test scores and that the elasticity of achievements with respect to the number of children in the family is 0 03 implying that the annual achievement growth of each child in a family will fall about 2 when a second child is added and about 0 5 when a sixth child is added 1

population concentration urbanization and demographic transition abstract this paper investigates how urbanization and demographic transition interrelate with each other via merits agglomeration economies and demerits congestion diseconomies of population concentration it reveals the mechanism by which agglomeration economies and congestion diseconomies affect the fertility rate furthermore analysis also shows that by assuming declines in infant and child mortality rate the model developed in this paper can replicate the following well known historical patterns i advances in urbanization ii rises in the wage rate iii declines in fertility and iv rises followed by declines in the population growth rate the inverted u shaped demographic transition

cyclicality mortality and the value of time the case of coffee price fluctuations and child survival in colombia recent studies demonstrate procyclical mortality in wealthy countries but there are reasons to expect a countercyclical relationship in developing nations we investigate how child survival in colombia responds to fluctuations in world arabica coffee prices and document starkly procyclical child deaths in studying this result s behavioral underpinnings we highlight that 1 the leading determinants of child health are inexpensive but require considerable time and 2 as the value of time declines with falling coffee prices so does the relative price of health we find a variety of direct evidence consistent with the primacy of time in child health production

health and agricultural productivity evidence from zambia we evaluate the productivity effects of investment in preventive health technology through a randomized controlled trial in rural zambia in the experiment access to subsidized bed nets was randomly assigned at the community level 516 farmers were followed over a one year farming period we find large positive effects of preventative health investment on productivity among farmers provided with access to free nets harvest value increased by us 76 corresponding to about 14 7 of the average output value while only limited information was collected on farming inputs shifts in the extensive and the intensive margins of labor supply appear to be the most likely mechanism underlying the productivity improvements observed

the historical fertility transition a guide for economists the historical fertility transition is the process by which much of europe and north america went from high to low fertility in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries this transformation is central to recent accounts of long run economic growth prior to the transition women bore as many as eight children each and the elasticity of fertility with respect to incomes was positive today many women have no children at all and the elasticity of fertility with respect to incomes is zero or even negative this paper discusses the large literature on the historical fertility transition focusing on what we do and do not know about the process i stress some possible misunderstandings of the demographic literature and discuss an agenda for future work jel i12 j13 n30

the effect of job displacement on couples fertility decisions this paper analyzes the effects of job displacement on fertility using finnish longitudinal register data we focus on couples where one spouse has lost a job due to a plant closure and follow them for several years before and following the job loss the results show that female job loss decreases fertility for every 100 displaced females there are three fewer children born male job loss has no impact on fertility despite resulting in a stronger decrease in family income than female job loss this indicates that the income effect is not the mechanism through which job displacement influences fertility

childbearing age family allowances and social security although the optimal policy under endogenous fertility has been widely studied the optimal public intervention under endogenous childbearing age has remained largely unexplored this paper examines the optimal family policy in a context where the number and the timing of births are chosen by individuals who differ as to how early fertility can weaken future earnings growth we analyze the design of a policy of family allowances and of public pensions in such a setting under distinct informational environments we show how endogenous childbearing ages affect the optimal policy through the redistribution across the earnings dimension and the internalization of fertility externalities it is also shown that contrary to common practice children benefits differentiated according to the age of parents can under some conditions be part of the optimal family policy

life expectancy and human capital investments evidence from maternal mortality declines longer life expectancy should encourage human capital accumulation since a longer time horizon increases the value of investments that pay out over time previous work has been unable to determine the empirical importance of this life expectancy effect due to the difficulty of isolating it from other effects of health on education we examine a sudden drop in maternal mortality risk in sri lanka between 1946 and 1953 which creates a sharp increase in life expectancy for school age girls without contemporaneous effects on health and which also allows for the use of boys as a control group using additional geographic variation we find that the 70 reduction in maternal mortality risk over the sample period increased female life expectancy at age 15 by 4 1 female literacy by 2 5 and female years of education by 4 0 authors

chronic disease burden and the interaction of education fertility and growth abstract this study considers the eradication of hookworm disease from the american south circa 1910 as a test of the quantity quality q q framework of fertility eradication was principally a shock to the price of quality because of three factors hookworm i depresses the return to human capital investment ii had a very low case fatality rate and iii had negligible prevalence among adults consistent with the q q model we find a significant decline in fertility associated with eradication

mortality reductions educational attainment and fertility choice this paper develops a model where reductions in mortality are the main force behind economic development the model generates a pattern of changes similar to the demographic transition where gains in life expectancy at birth are followed by reductions in fertility and increases in the rate of human capital accumulation the onset of the transition is characterized by a critical level of life expectancy at birth which marks the movement of the economy from a malthusian equilibrium to an equilibrium with investments in human capital and the possibility of long run growth

corruption fertility and human capital abstract we build an overlapping generations model in which reproductive households face a child quantity child quality trade off and bureaucrats are delegated with the task of delivering public services that support the accumulation of human capital by integrating the theoretical analyses of endogenous growth corruption and fertility choices we show that the negative relation between fertility and economic development may also be affected by differences in the magnitude of bureaucratic corruption

the political economy of targeting one of the most widely used method of targeting is to reduce welfare benefits as income rises although the need for such targeting is clear enough it also entails two important difficulties firstly the prospect for the recipients of losing part of their benefits if they were to earn more can be a deterrent to work harder secondly by reducing the number of recipients targeting reduces the political support for taxation and redistribution the purpose of this paper is to study the voting equilibrium of the degree of targeting and the level of taxation in an economy where labour supply is variable the analysis reveals that targeting may be fatal for redistribution even though it rejects strictly less than the richest half of the population and that it is not possible for a coalition of the extremes to form and reject the middle income group from the welfare system moreover because targeting affects labour supply we find that pareto improvements are possible when targeting is either too low or too high we also find that voting simultaneously over taxation and targeting is favourable to the poor in the sense that they can converge to their most preferred policy by successively forming a majority coalition with the rich to increase targeting and with the middle to increase taxation

structural change and the fertility transition this paper provides new insights into the relationship between structural change and the fertility transition we exploit the spread of an agricultural pest in the american south in the 1890s as pl

some analytics of the laffer curve abstract it is shown that in a general equilibrium model with one private good one public good labour and an income tax certain widely assumed properties of the laffer curve do not necessarily hold for well behaved functional forms it may not be continuous and may not have an interior maximum its slope depends on technology as well as on the tax elasticity of labour supply for certain technologies a more negative elasticity may imply a more positive slope moreover the relevant tax elasticity is a general equilibrium one which may differ in sign from the widely quoted partial equilibrium one

new public offerings information and investor rationality the case of publicly offered commodity funds publicly traded commodity funds have been poor investment vehicles yet new funds are a fast growing part of the investment scene in this article the authors show that the information provided to investors is significantly biased upward and that true performance cannot be determined by the information most investors see thus investment in commodity funds given the information set is rational while the authors limit the study to commodity funds the same should hold for other limited partnerships such as real estate oil and gas copyright 1989 by the university of chicago

disease and development the effect of life expectancy on economic growth we exploit the major international health improvements from the 1940s to estimate the effect of life expectancy on economic performance we construct predicted mortality using preintervention mortality rates from various diseases and dates of global interventions predicted mortality has a large impact on changes in life expectancy starting in 1940 but no effect before 1940 using predicted mortality as an instrument we find that a 1 percent increase in life expectancy leads to a 1 7 2 percent increase in population life expectancy has a much smaller effect on total gdp however consequently there is no evidence that the large increase in life expectancy raised income per capita

evidence on the demographic transition abstract this paper finds that fertility responds to productivity differently depending on the economy s stage of development at low levels of development productivity increases will increase fertility while at the more advanced stages of development productivity increases lower fertility during the process there may be important interaction effects between productivity and education demand increases in secondary education demand generate fertility declines regardless of the stage of development

disease and development evidence from hookworm eradication in the american south this study evaluates the economic consequences of the successful eradication of hookworm disease from the american south the hookworm eradication campaign c 1910 began soon after i the discovery that a variety of health problems among southerners could be attributed to the disease and ii the donation by john d rockefeller of a substantial sum to the effort the rockefeller sanitary commission rsc surveyed infection rates in the affected areas eleven southern states and found that an average of forty percent of school aged children were infected with hookworm the rsc then sponsored treatment and education campaigns across the region follow up studies indicate that this campaign substantially reduced hookworm disease almost immediately the sudden introduction of this treatment combines with the cross area differences in pre treatment infection rates to form the basis of the identification strategy areas with higher levels of hookworm infection prior to the rsc experienced greater increases in school enrollment attendance and literacy after the intervention this result is robust to controlling for a variety of alternative factors including differential trends across areas changing crop prices shifts in certain educational and health policies and the effect of malaria eradication no significant contemporaneous results are found for adults who should have benefited less from the intervention owing to their substantially lower prior infection rates a long term follow up of affected cohorts indicates a substantial gain in income that coincided with exposure to hookworm eradication i also find evidence that eradication increased the return to schooling

do family wealth shocks affect fertility choices evidence from the housing market abstract this paper uses wealth changes driven by housing market variation to estimate the effect of family resources on fertility decisions using data from the panel study of income dynamics we show that a 100 000 increase in housing wealth among home owners causes a 16 to 18 increase in the probability of having a child there is no evidence of an effect of msa level housing price growth on the fertility of renters however we also present evidence that housing wealth growth increases total fertility and that the responsiveness of fertility to housing wealth has increased over time commensurate with the recent housing boom

malthus was right explaining a millennium of stagnation abstract we develop a simple malthusian growth model with continuous productivity growth and derive the stationary steady state equilibrium we show that linearisation around the steady state gives an empirically tractable model of malthusian wage and population behaviour using the familiar concept of convergence our empirical strategy addresses the concern in the literature over model identification and inconsistent parameter estimates based on newly constructed population data we estimate wage and population growth models using panel data for up to 17 countries from 900ce to 1870ce our results provide the first time series evidence of a strong malthusian trap that was pervasive across countries and time before the 19th century industrial revolution

of tournaments and temptations an analysis of managerial incentives in the mutual fund industry we test the hypothesis that when their compensation is linked to relative performance managers of investment portfolios likely to end up as losers will manipulate fund risk differently than those managing portfolios likely to be winners an empirical investigation of the performance of 334 growth oriented mutual funds during 1976 to 1991 demonstrates that mid year losers tend to increase fund volatility in the latter part of an annual assessment period to a greater extent than mid year winners furthermore we show that this effect became stronger as industry growth and investor awareness of fund performance increased over time

life expectancy and human capital evidence from the international epidemiological transition exploiting preintervention variation in mortality from various infectious diseases together with the time variation arising from medical breakthroughs in the late 1940s and the 1950s this study examines how a large positive shock to life expectancy influenced the formation of human capital within countries during the second half of the 20th century the results establish that the rise in life expectancy was behind a significant part of the increase in human capital over this period according to the baseline estimate for one additional year of life expectancy years of schooling increase by 0 17 year moreover the evidence suggests that declines in pneumonia mortality are the underlying cause of this finding indicating that improved childhood health increases human capital investments

the problem of population and growth a review of the literature from malthus to contemporary models of endogenous population and endogenous growth abstract this paper deals with the evolution of the literature on the problem of population and growth from the classical period to the recent literature on endogenous growth and development the problem concerns two distinct issues 1 how to explain the observed covariation of the levels and rates of growth of per capita income and population size over time and space and 2 how to improve the human condition represented by these variables through an accommodating social policy the evolution of the literature we survey is reflected by the progressive treatment of key variables as endogenous rather than exogenous to the growth process it is also reflected by a shift from the historical concern about population explosion and its implications for growth to the more recent concern about the association between growth and population implosion in many developed countries

malthus in sweden this paper presents some new and unique cross county data from 19th century sweden over birth death and marriage rates grain prices and harvests local grain prices correlate negatively with local harvests suggesting imperfectly integrated food markets the so called positive and preventive checks are also present good local harvests are associated with high birth and marriage rates and low death rates we also find that the fertility and marriage effects from changes in prices but not harvests are greater in counties that rely more on manufacturing consistent with an open economy model of fertility choice where agents earn income from both agriculture and manufacturing

do labor market opportunities affect young women s work and family decisions experimental evidence from india do labor market opportunities for women affect marriage and fertility decisions we provided three years of recruiting services to help young women in randomly selected rural indian villages get jobs in the business process outsourcing industry because the industry was so new at the time of the study there was almost no awareness of these jobs allowing us in effect to exogenously increase women s labor force opportunities from the perspective of rural households we find that young women in treatment villages were significantly less likely to get married or have children during this period choosing instead to enter the labor market or obtain more schooling or postschool training women also report wanting to have fewer children and to work more steadily throughout their lifetime consistent with increased aspirations for a career copyright 2012 oxford university press

climate and the emergence of global income differences the latitude gradient in comparative development is a striking fact as one moves away from the equator economic activity rises while this regularity is well known it is not well understood in the present paper we take a step towards unpacking this gradient perhaps the strongest correlate with absolute latitude is the intensity of ultraviolet radiation uv r which epidemiological research has shown to be a cause of a wide range of diseases we establish that uv r is strongly and negatively correlated with economic activity both across and within countries we propose and test a mechanism that links uv r to current income differences via the impact of disease ecology on the timing of the take off to sustained growth

cause of death and development in the us abstract exploiting cross state variation in infectious causes of death along with time variation arising from medical innovations toward the middle of the twentieth century this study examines the consequences of a positive health shock in the us it establishes that states with higher levels of mortality from infectious causes prior to the onset of the era of big medicine experienced greater increases in life expectancy population and total gdp after its onset whereas per capita gdp remained largely unchanged together the evidence suggests that the rise in life expectancy had no significant effect on living standards in the us during the time period 1940 1980 these results are robust to controlling for initial health and initial economic conditions

malthus in the light of climate change abstract to reconsider the malthusian predictions of natural limits to economic development the paper develops a multi sector growth model with exhaustible resource extraction investments in physical and knowledge capital climate change and endogenous fertility economic growth is driven by endogenous innovations which increase in the availability and productivity of research labour poor substitution of natural resources triggers sectoral change climate change is the result of polluting resource use which is like consumption and investments based on the intertemporal optimization of the households highlighting the importance of bounded resource supply and of rational extraction decisions i show that climate change is independent of population growth in steady state and there is no causal relationship between climate and population during transition to steady state the consumption per capita growth rate rises in the innovation rate and the output elasticities of labour and capital in the different sectors unlike climate policy population policy is not warranted it may be counterproductive because labour is crucial for the research sector

mortality versus morbidity in the demographic transition abstract the link between the mortality and epidemiological transitions is used to identify the effect of the former on the fertility transition a mortality transition that is not accompanied by improving morbidity causes slower demographic and economic change in a model where children may die from infectious disease childhood health affects human capital and noninfectious disease related adult mortality when child mortality falls from lower prevalence as it did in western europe labor productivity improves fertility falls and the economy prospers when it falls mainly from better cures as it has in sub saharan africa survivors are less healthy and there is little economic growth the model can quantitatively explain sub saharan africa s experience more generally it shows that the commonly used indicator life expectancy at birth is a poor predictor of population health and economic growth unless morbidity falls with mortality

did the great recession affect fertility examining the impact of job displacements on the timing of births in the united states we examine the impact of job losses during the great recession on fertility in the united states we find that for married cohabiting couples job losses of males during the recession decreased the likelihood of birth in contrast job losses of married cohabiting females had no impact on average on fertility because of opposing age specific effects although younger women were reducing fertility after job losses to cope with the loss of income older women aged 40 and above were more likely to have a child following their job loss moreover we find that job losses of single noncohabiting females decreased the likelihood of birth particularly for women below the age of 25 this negative effect on fertility persisted in the medium term up to three years following the job losses overall these results suggest that job losses during the recession may be partly responsible for the recent decline in the u s birth rates

income shocks contraceptive use and timing of fertility abstract this paper examines the relationship between income shocks and fertility decisions using panel data from tanzania we estimate the impact of agricultural shocks on pregnancies births and contraception use the likelihood of pregnancies and childbirth are significantly lower for households that experience a crop shock furthermore women have significantly higher contraception use after crop losses the increase in contraceptive use comes almost entirely from traditional contraceptive methods such as abstinence and the rhythm method we argue that these changes in behavior are the result of deliberate decisions of the households rather than the shocks effects on other factors that influence fertility such as women s health status the absence or migration of a spouse the dissolution of partnerships or the number of hours worked we also show that although traditional contraceptives have low overall efficacy households with a strong incentive to postpone fertility are very effective at using them

the effects of child mortality changes on fertility choice and parental welfare empirical studies have overwhelmingly shown that a lower child mortality rate leads to lower fertility yet it has not been possible to satisfactorily analyze this relationship in even the simplest theoretical models this paper attempts to bridge this gap between theory and the empirical literature the paper also presents results on the effects of child mortality changes on parental welfare the analysis captures the dynamic stochastic feature of fertility choice subsumes other endogeneous choices e g the quality of the children and treats the number of children as a discrete variable this added realism is important for the analysis

intergenerational trade longevity and economic growth we develop an overlapping generations model of endogenous growth in which human capital is the engine of growth and the generations are linked through material and emotional interdependencies within the family parents invest in their children to achieve both old age support care and emotional gratification and material support from children is determined through self enforcing implicit contracts we show that optimal intergenerational trade can then lead to maximization of growth opportunities our model produces a theory of the demographic transition linking longevity fertility and economic growth we also show that while population aging may raise the growth rate an increase in young age longevity is likely to produce a greater increase in the growth rate and a reduction in the fertility rate in a growth equilibrium these predictions and the model s implications concerning the behavior of private savings during the takeoff period appear consistent with empirical evidence

children and their parents a review of fertility and causality childbearing decisions are not made in isolation they are taken in concert with decisions regarding work marriage health investments and stocks as well as many other observable and non observable considerations drawing causal inferences regarding the effect of additional children on family outcomes is complicated by these endogenous factors this paper lays out the issues involved in estimating the effect of additional child births on family outcomes and the assumptions underlying the range of estimators and methodologies proposed in the economic literature the common pitfalls of these estimators are discussed as well as their potential to bias our interpretation of the effect additional births have on children and parents both in the existing literature and in future work in the face of changing patterns of childbearing and child rearing

are children really inferior goods evidence from displacement driven income shocks abstract this paper explores the causal link between income and fertility by analyzing women s fertility response to the large and permanent income shock generated by a husband s job displacement i find that the shock reduces total fertility suggesting that the causal effect of income on fertility is positive a model that incorporates the time cost of children and assortative matching of spouses can simultaneously explain this result and the negative cross sectional relationship i also find that a husband s displacement accelerates childbearing which is consistent with lifecycle models of fertility in which the incentive to delay is driven by expected earnings growth

household choices of child labor and schooling a simple model with application to brazil this paper argues that conflicting results from previous literature related to the effect of economic conditions on child labor derive from different income and substitution effects implicit in different types of income variation we use agricultural shocks to local economic activity in brazil coffee production to distinguish between increases in household income and increases in the opportunity cost of time results show that higher household wealth is associated with lower child labor and higher schooling nevertheless temporary increases in local economic activity are associated with higher child labor and lower schooling particularly for children with poor economic backgrounds

barriers to prosperity parasitic and infectious diseases iq and economic development iq scores differ substantially across nations this study argues that cross country variations in iq scores to a large extent reflect the burden of parasitic and infectious diseases pids and iron and iodine deficiency iid in infancy and in utero furthermore it is shown that the prevalence of health insults through the channel of cognitive ability is influential for the level as well as the growth in productivity across the world using data for 181 countries and an instrumental variable approach regressions reveal that the prevalence of pid iids is influential for growth and income inequalities globally

can internal migration foster the convergence in regional fertility rates evidence from 19th century france this paper offers an explanation for the convergence of fertility rates across french departements in the second half of the nineteenth century that emphasises the diffusion of information through internal migration it tests how migration affected fertility by building a decennial bilateral migration matrix between french departements for 1861 1911 the identification strategy uses exogenous variation in transportation costs resulting from the construction of railways the results suggest that the convergence towards low birth rates can be explained by the diffusion of cultural and economic information pertaining to low fertility behaviour by migrants especially by migrants to and from paris

economic geography fertility and migration abstract this paper analyzes the relationship among economic geography fertility and migration the empirical evidence presented reveals that persistent regional variations in fertility exist within a country and that regional total fertility rates are negatively related to regional population density a two period overlapping generations model of endogenous fertility incorporating n regions agglomeration economies and congestion diseconomies is constructed to explain this negative relationship while agglomeration economies have both positive income and negative substitution effects on fertility congestion diseconomies have a negative income effect on it combined with the mobility of people interaction among these effects generates the negative relationship as a steady state equilibrium outcome it is also shown that net migration from regions with lower population density to regions with higher population density occurs in an equilibrium which in turn maintains the regional variations in fertility

new equity funds marketing and performance we discuss two strategies sponsors have used successfully to introduce new equity funds and promote the performance of the funds after their introduction the strategy of incubation allows funds that compile a favorable track record in private to be marketed to the public at a later opportune time the strategy of selective attention directs favorable allocations of special situations into new funds that are open to the public introduction strategies are most apparent among aggressive growth funds where first year performance has increasingly become superior incubator funds remain small while private but once opened they quickly increase in size and revert to median performance the first year success of selective attention funds also attracts large amounts of cash which undermines their subsequent performance

children and their parents labor supply evidence from exogenous variation in family size although theoretical models of labor supply and the family are well developed there are few credible estimates of key empirical relationships in the work family nexus this study uses a new instrumental variable the sex composition of the first two births in families with at least two children to estimate the effect of additional children on parents labor supply in the united states instrumental variables estimates using the sex mix are substantial but smaller than the corresponding ordinary least squares ols estimates moreover unlike the ols estimates the female labor supply effects estimated using sex mix instruments appear to be absent among more educated women and women with high wage husbands we also find that married women who have a third child reduce their labor supply by as much as women in the full sample while there is no relationship between wives child bearing and husbands labor supply excerpt

the more the merrier the effect of family size and birth order on children s education there is an extensive theoretical literature that postulates a tradeoff between child quantity and quality within a family however there is little causal evidence that speaks to this theory using a rich dataset on the entire population of norway over an extended period of time we examine the effects of family size and birth order on the educational attainment of children while we find a negative correlation between family size and children s education when we include indicators for birth order and or use twin births as an instrument family size effects become negligible in addition birth order has a significant and large negative effect on children s education we also study adult earnings employment and teenage childbearing and find strong evidence for birth order effects with these outcomes particularly among women these findings suggest the need to revisit economic models of fertility and child production focusing not only on differences across families but differences within families as well

population technology and growth from malthusian stagnation to the demographic transition and beyond this paper develops a unied growth model that captures the historical evolution of population technology and output it encompasses theendogenous transitionbetween three regimes that have characterized economic development the economy evolves from amalthusianregime wheretechnologicalprogressis slow andpopulationgrowthprevents anysustainedriseinincomepercapita intoapost malthusianregime wheretechnological progress rises and population growth absorbs only part of output growth ultimately a demographic transition reverses the positive relationship between income and population growth andtheeconomyentersamoderngrowthregimewithreducedpopulationgrowth

changing world prices women s wages and the fertility transition sweden 1860 1910 this time series analysis examines during 1860 1910 the impact of changes in local prices of agricultural commodities on wages among men and women in sweden and the impact of changes in wages on fertility decline child mortality urbanization and improved social conditions linear ordinary least squares models are set up to determine whether demand induced increases in womens wages relative to mens are significant factors in explaining swedish total fertility rates data are obtained from 25 counties and the city of stockholm among pooled observations for six time periods during 1860 64 and 1910 14 this period is marked by a total fertility decline of 28 a marital fertility decline of 26 and a child mortality decline of 52 explanatory variables are the relative prices of main agricultural outputs employment outside of agriculture the proportion of urban population and the child mortality rate findings indicate a significant relationship between child mortality and total fertility and specific fertility rates among women aged 20 39 years a doubling of the male real wage rate was significantly associated with earlier marriage higher birth rates among women aged 15 29 years and lower birth rates among women aged 35 49 years the ratio of male wages to female wages was associated with a decline in birth rates at all ages with the exception of teenagers 66 of fertility increase was due to declines in child mortality but this increase was counterbalanced by fertility decline among older women child mortality and urbanization depressed marital fertility male wages increased the proportion married a 10 increase in the male female wage rate was associated with a 25 reduction in the total fertility rate another 25 increase in the male female wage rate was associated with a 50 reduction in child mortality it is concluded that the value of womens time had a key impact on the swedish fertility transition

the impacts of family size on investment in child quality using multiple births as an exogenous shift in family size i investigate the impact of the number of children on child investment and child well being using data from the 1980 us census five percent public use micro sample 2sls results demonstrate that parents facing a change in family size reallocate resources in a way consistent with becker s quantity quality model a larger family generated by twins in a later birth reduces the likelihood that older children attend private school reduces the mother s labor force participation and increases the likelihood that parents divorce the impact of family size on a measure of child outcome such as grade retention is less clear the results indicate that for both measures of child investment and child well being the 2sls estimates are statistically distinguishable from ols estimates indicating an omitted variables bias in the single equation model

persistence in industrial policy impacts evidence from depression era mississippi this paper studies the effects of a large scale industrial policy implemented in 1930s mississippi on contemporaneous and modern day labor market outcomes attracted by unprecedented government incentives under mississippi s balance agriculture with industry bawi program 13 large manufacturing plants established operations in the state between 1936 and 1940 using difference in differences and synthetic control matching techniques i find that counties that received these plants experienced an over 15 increase in female labor force participation on average in the short run moreover these effects persisted decades into the future well after many of the original companies shut down i also find suggestive evidence of an increase in educational attainment among women in counties where bawi investment occurred the results highlight the potential for even transitory government interventions to have long lived effects on labor markets

what has driven the great fertility decline in developing countries since 1960 several developing countries are currently experiencing a significant fertility decline however academic economists have paid little attention to this transition this paper seeks to explain the fertility transition by infant mortality urbanisation income culture and educational attainment of females and males using annual data for 92 developing countries over the period 1960 2014 external instruments are used to deal with endogeneity the results suggest that increasing per capita income improved female education and increasing secularisation have been important determinants for declining fertility in the developing world

are n 1 heads better than one the case of mutual fund managers abstract recent studies find that mutual funds exhibit differential and persistent performance which is frequently attributed to superior managerial decision making we extend the literature by examining the impact of the fund s management structure on performance outcomes specifically we examine directly whether superior outcomes in terms of risk adjusted returns may be explained by behavioral decision making theory that asserts that teams make better decisions than individuals empirical results are consistent with the classical decision making theory and the efficient market hypothesis

escaping malthus economic growth and fertility change in the developing world following mid twentieth century predictions of malthusian catastrophe fertility in the developing world more than halved while living standards more than doubled we analyze how fertility change related to economic growth during this episode using data on 2 3 million women from 255 household surveys we find different responses to fluctuations and long run growth both heterogeneous over the life cycle fertility was procyclical but declined and delayed with long run growth fluctuations late but not early in the reproductive period affected lifetime fertility the results are consistent with models of the escape from the malthusian trap extended with a life cycle and liquidity constraints

fertility transitions along the extensive and intensive margins this paper examines the fertility transition through a new lens the extensive margin parents with high levels of children might substitute quality for quantity as the constraints on quality relax or those on quantity tighten however along the extensive margin the quantity quality trade off cannot operate at low levels of fertility we expect quality and quantity to be essential complements we apply these insights to a large school construction program in the american south during the early 20th century the rosenwald rural schools initiative we find that increased schooling opportunities lead to reductions in fertility among women with high fertility levels while at the same time inducing higher levels of fertility among women with low levels of fertility the magnitude of the fertility changes induced in the parent generation is however small compared to the changes in fertility induced by the rosenwald intervention among women that were themselves treated by the intervention the evidence from the rosenwald intervention therefore suggests that changes in female opportunity costs induced by increased educational attainment might be among the most important driving forces of the fertility transition

population growth and natural resource scarcity long run development under seemingly unfavorable conditions in this paper i consider an economy that is constrained by the use of natural resources and driven by knowledge accumulation resources are essential inputs in all sectors i show that population growth and poor input substitution are not detrimental but on the contrary are even necessary to obtain a sustainable consumption level i find a general rule to define the conditions for a constant innovation rate the rule does not apply to capital but to labor growth which is the crucial input in research furthermore the rule relates to the sectoral structure of the economy and to demographic transition the results continue to hold with a backstop technology and are extended for the case of minimum resource constraints

population growth and human capital investments theory and evidence this paper presents evidence from empirical studies that test hypotheses derived from models of household behavior pertaining to the interrelationships among population growth human capital and economic development these studies have exploited quasi natural experiments embodied in the cross area variability in the wage rates of children in a number of low income countries the intercouple variation in the biological propensity to conceive and the geographically selective introduction of new high yielding seed varieties in india in the period 1961 71 the different varieties of evidence support the hypotheses that alterations in the returns to human capital associated with exogenous technical change lead simultaneously to increases in human capital investments and to reductions in fertility and that the costliness of fertility control is a significant but modest factor in inhibiting human capital investments

time series growth in the female labor force in this paper we investigate the reasons for the growth in the female labor force in america during the twentieth century in our research we study the longer term trends since 1900 and conduct a more intensive examination of developments after the second world war on the basis of our work we conclude that rising real wages accounted for 60 of the total growth in the female labor force half of this wage effect in expanding labor supply was the fertility reducing consequence of a higher female wage

are children normal abstract we examine becker s 1960 contention that children are normal for the cross section of non hispanic white married couples in the united states we show that when we restrict comparisons to similarly educated women living in similarly expensive locations completed fertility is positively correlated with the husband s income the empirical evidence is consistent with children being normal in an effort to show causal effects we analyze the localized impact on fertility of the mid 1970s increase in world energy prices an exogenous shock that substantially increased men s incomes in the appalachian coal mining region empirical evidence for that population indicates that fertility increases with men s income

does the availability of high wage jobs for low skilled men affect welfare expenditures evidence from shocks to the steel and coal industries abstract we study shocks to the coal and steel industries to measure the effect of long term changes in demand for low skilled workers on welfare expenditures the coal and steel industries have historically paid high wages to low skilled men we find a substantial increase in welfare expenditures in response to the collapse of the steel and coal industries in the 1980s and an even more substantial reduction in welfare expenditures during the coal boom of the 1970s additional analysis indicates the reduction in welfare expenditures during the coal boom is due in part to a decline in single parent households

the trade off between child quantity and quality an empirical investigation of trade offs between number of children and their scholastic performance confirms that family size directly affects children s achievement though parents show no favori

contraception and development a unified growth theory this study investigates the interaction of the use of modern contraceptives fertility education and long run growth it develops an economic model that takes into account that sexual intercourse is utility enhancing and that birth control by modern contraceptives is more efficient but more costly than traditional methods the study shows how a traditional economy in which modern contraceptives are not used gradually converges toward a high growth regime in which modern contraceptives are used lower prices or higher efficacy of contraceptives are conducive to an earlier onset of the fertility transition and a quicker takeoff to modern growth

missing women and the price of tea in china the effect of sex specific earnings on sex imbalance economists have long argued that the sex imbalance in developing countries is caused by underlying economic conditions this paper uses exogenous increases in sex specific agricultural income caused by post mao reforms in china to estimate the effects of total income and sex specific income on sex differential survival of children increasing female income holding male income constant improves survival rates for girls whereas increasing male income holding female income constant worsens survival rates for girls increasing female income increases educational attainment of all children whereas increasing male income decreases educational attainment for girls and has no effect on boys educational attainment