This paper develops a general equilibrium model of fertility and human capital investment under uncertainty. Uncertainty exists in the form of a probability that a young adult does not survive to old age. Parents maximize expected utility arising from own consumption, their fertility, and the...

The authors examine the relative importance of the growth of physical and human capital and the growth of total factor productivity (TFP) using newly organized data on 145 countries that span more than one hundred years for twenty-four of these countries. For all countries, only 3 percent of...

Our model of growth departs from both the Malthusian and neoclassical approaches by including investments in human capital. We assume, crucially, that rates of return on human capital investments rise, rather than, decline, as the stock of human capital increases, until the stock becomes large....