This article introduces a social planner version of a model central to the New Economic Geography for explicitly answering whether the symmetric equilibrium outcome of the decentralized market economy is socially desirable. We find that savings incentives are too weak, resulting in an...

In general, the spreading of egalitarian family values has often been associated with a decline in fertility. However, recently a rebound in fertility has been observed in several industrialized countries. A possible explanation of this trend may be the spread of egalitarian values that induced...

Persistent low fertility rates lead to lower population growth rates and eventually also to decreasing population sizes in most industrialized countries. There are fears that this demographic development is associated with declines in per capita GDP and possibly also increasing inequality of the...

We show that in a large class of distributed optimal control models (DOCM), where population is described by a McKendrick type equation with an endogenous number of newborns, the reproductive value of Fisher shows up as part of the shadow price of the population. Depending on the objective...

This paper examines the impact of idiosyncratic income shocks on household consumption, educational expenditure and fertility in Indonesia, and assesses whether the investment in human capital of children and fertility are used to smooth household consumption. Using six different kinds of...

During recent years there has been an increasing awareness of the explanatory power of demographic variables in economic growth regressions. We estimate a new model of the effects of age structure change on economic growth. We use the new model and recent probabilistic demographic projections...

It is generally accepted that lower population growth is associated with positive economic development. Although there is a large body of literature supporting this hypothesis at the macro level, few studies have analyzed the causal e®ect of fertility on household welfare at the micro level. In...

The discussion on the causes of the most recent fertility decline in Europe, and in particular on the emergence of lowest low fertility, emphasises the relevance of cultural factors in addition to economic ones. Being part of such a cultural framework, the heterogeneity of preferences concerning...

In this paper we study changes in the size and the composition of the labour force in five OECD countries from 1983 through 2000. We apply a recent decomposition method to quantify the components of the change over time in the crude labour force rate and the mean age of the labour force. Our...

Various authors find that in OECD countries the cross-country correlation between the total fertility rate and the female labour force participation rate turned from a negative value before the 1980s to a positive value thereafter. Based on pooled time series analysis the literature seems to...