Abstract: The first challenge for economic growth theory is to understand the transition from stagnation to growth at the time of the Industrial Revolution and in particular to identify the main factor(s) that triggered the take-off. Doing so also helps to understand why there are poor and rich...

Parental time with children increases with the education of both the mother and the father. As the education of parents increases, the gap between childcare supplied by mothers relative to that supplied by fathers decreases. A two steps semi-cooperative marital decision model is proposed to...

Among possible lifestyles, the DINKs (“double income no kids”) are couples choosing to be childless, while the DEWKs (“dually employed with kids”) are couples with children. We develop a theory of marriage and parenthood decisions, where we distinguish the choice to have children from...

Beyond natural sterility, there are two main types of childlessness: one driven by poverty and another by the high opportunity cost to child-rearing. We argue that taking childlessness and its causes into account matters for assessing the impact of development policies on fertility. We measure...

Through indirect inference, we investigate the extent to which religions’supposed pronatalism is detrimental to growth via the fertility/education channel. Using censuses from South-East Asia, we first estimate an empirical model of fertility and show that having a religious affiliation...