The aim of this research is to build on a theory for explaining economic development in a (neoclassical) growth model with endogenous fertility. The economy is comprised of overlapping generations of rational and identical individuals and identical competitive firms producing with a...

A central policy issue in the battle against HIV in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) is whether and when high-prevalence countries might become fully autonomous in designing and implementing their own intervention policies aimed to control the disease. The aim of this research is twofold. First, it...

Fertility rates have declined dramatically across almost all highincome countries over the past decades. This has raised concerns about future economic prospects. Indeed, fully- and semi-endogenous growth models imply that a shrinking workforce would lead to declining income growth and perhaps...

We assess the long-run growth effects of rising longevity and increasing the retirement age when growth is driven by purposeful research and development. In contrast to economies in which growth depends on learning-by-doing spillovers, raising the retirement age fosters economic growth. How...

While it is well known that there are systematic birth order effects on life cycle outcomes, there is less consensus about underlying channels and mechanisms of birth order effects. We find negative birth order effects among Chinese adolescents, favoring earlier-born children within household in...

Nozick's "utility monster" - a being who is more efficient than other persons at transforming resources into well-being - is often regarded as deeply impossible, on the ground of the incapacity of a single person to have a life that is better than a large number of other lives. In this article,...

Housing is a basic need and is intricately connected to a household's health and wellness. The current pandemic has exposed the housing vulnerability for certain subgroups of the population and further jeopardized these household's health and stability. Using the Household Pulse Survey launched...

Physically attractive individuals experience a range of advantages in adulthood including higher earnings; yet, how attractiveness influences earlier consequential decisions is not well understood. This paper estimates the effect of attractiveness on engagement in risky behaviours in...

This study investigates the income-happiness puzzle in China by examining the trends in happiness and economic growth over the past two decades. It is the first long-term study in China to utilize a consistent national representative survey in the new century. Using data from the Chinese General...

Welfare States do not insure citizens against the risk of premature death, i.e., the risk of having a short life. Using a dynamic OLG model with risky lifetime, this paper compares two insurance devices reducing well-being volatility due to the risk of early death: (i) an ante-mortem age-based...