We question the received wisdom that birth limitation was absent among historical populations before the fertility transition of the late nineteenth-century. Using duration and panel models on family-level data, we find a causal, negative short-run effect of living standards on birth spacing in...

This research explores the origins of the distribution of time preference across regions. It advances the hypothesis, and establishes empirically that geographical variations in the natural return to agricultural investment have had a persistent effect on the distribution of time preference...