The paper examines the international inequality and convergence of educational attainment from 1960 to 1990. Despite the increasing trend in educational attainment, the gap in educational attainment between the developing countries and developed countries and that between males and females...

We construct a simple growth model where agents with uncertain survival choose schooling time, life-cycle consumption and the number of children. We show that rising longevity reduces fertility but raises saving, schooling time and the growth rate at a diminishing rate. Cross-section analyses...

While earlier empirical studies found a negative saving effect of old-age dependency rates without considering longevity, recent studies have found that longevity has a positive effect on growth without considering old-age dependency rates. In this paper, we first justify the related yet...

In this paper, we use new survey data on twins born in urban China, among whom many experienced the consequences of the forced mass rustication movement of the Chinese "cultural revolution," to identify the distinct roles of altruism and guilt in affecting behavior within families. Based on a...

This paper estimates the gender-specific effects of birthweight on a variety of schooling and labor market outcomes. A unique feature of the study is to use micro evidence on the relationship between birthweight - an early measure of nutritional advantage - and schooling outcomes to make...

Parental schooling is widely thought to improve child outcomes. But most studies on parental-child relations are associative, without control for estimation problems, such as unobserved intergenerationally-correlated endowments, if causality is of interest. The few exceptions are relatively...

An open question in the literature is whether families compensate or reinforce the impact of child health shocks. Discussions usually focus on one dimension of child investment. This paper examines multiple dimensions using household survey data on Chinese child twins whose average age is 11. We...