face a second trade-off in allocating their time between increasing their own human capital and rearing children. The model displays different regimes. In a Malthusian regime with no education fertility increases with adult life expectancy. In the modern growth regime, life expectancy and...

We build a unique dataset of 300,000 famous people born between Hammurabi's epoch and 1879, Einstein's birth year. It includes, among other variables, the vital dates, occupations, and locations of celebrities from the Index Bio-bibliographicus Notorum Hominum (IBN), a very comprehensive...

A comprehensive study of the linkages between demographic and economic variables should not only account for vintage specificity but also incorporate the relevant economic and demographic decisions in a complete optimal control set-up. In this paper, a methodological set-up allowing to reach...

We propose a new theory of the demographic transition based on the evidence that body development during childhood is an important predictor of adult life expectancy. Fertility, childhood development, longevity, education and income growth all result from individual decisions. Parents face a...

We study how economic growth is affected by demographics in an overlapping generations model with a realistic survival law. Individuals optimally chose the dates at which they leave school to enter the labor market and at which they retire. Endoneous growth arises thanks to the accumulation of...

A comprehensive study of the linkages between demographic and economic variables should not only account for vintage specificity but also incorporate the relevant economic and demographic decisions in a complete optimal control set-up. In this paper, a methodological set-up allowing to reach...

We propose a new theory of the demographic transition based on the evidence that body development during childhood is an important factor for life expectancy. The key and novel mechanism of the model is that parents face a tradeoff between the quantity of children and the childhood development...