Beyond natural sterility, there are two main types of childlessness: one driven by poverty and another by the high opportunity cost to child-rearing. We argue that taking childlessness and its causes into account matters for assessing the impact of development policies on fertility. We measure...

Through indirect inference, we investigate the extent to which religions’supposed pronatalism is detrimental to growth via the fertility/education channel. Using censuses from South-East Asia, we first estimate an empirical model of fertility and show that having a religious affiliation...

Abstract: The first challenge for economic growth theory is to understand the transition from stagnation to growth at the time of the Industrial Revolution and in particular to identify the main factor(s) that triggered the take-off. Doing so also helps to understand why there are poor and rich...

La décroissance prévisible de la population terrestre doit plutôt être vue comme un facteur positif de développement à long terme. La transition peut néanmoins être délicate. Les politiques natalistes risquent de privilégier le nombre par rapport à l’investissement dans chaque...

Among possible lifestyles, the DINKs (“double income no kids”) are couples choosing to be childless, while the DEWKs (“dually employed with kids”) are couples with children. We develop a theory of marriage and parenthood decisions, where we distinguish the choice to have children from...

This paper examines the introduction of monopolistic competition into wage bargaining models : in addition to capital-labour substitution, we also consider a cost-push effect. The right-to-manage model requires strong restrictions on the objective functions and leads to problematic conclusions...

We investigate and interpret sorne of the properties of a multi-sectoral growth model with endogenous embodied technical change in the light of the ongoing debate on the viability of an IT based growth regime. In particular. we illustrate the two main views of the 1995-2000 IT boom in the USA....

A dynamic contracting model with endogenous prices, wages and investment is presented. It accounts for capital and labour underutilization at steady state and displays various patterns of unemployment rate and capacity utilization rate co-movements as a function of demand and supply shocks. The...

We build a multi-sector model with wage bargaining and imperfect competition to analyse the links between wage interdependence and competitiveness. Quantity constraints together with union power, firm market power and wage externalities play a significant role in the determination of...

Consider an economy populated by males and females, both rich and poor. The society has to choose one of the following marriage institutions: polygyny, strict monogamy, and serial monogamy (divorce and remarriage). After having identified the conditions under which each of these equilibria...