productivity: a new technology is "more risky" and more productive on average. In this context, the adoption of the new technology from a low level of income (close to subsistence) generates a gradual increase in the investment to output ratio.

The authors study the impact of a minimum consumption requirement on the rate of economic growth and the evolution of wealth distribution. The requirement introduces a positive dependence between the intertemporal elasticity of substitution and household wealth. This dependence implies a...

How important was international immigration for the U.S. and its demography during the nineteenth century? This paper investigates, quantitatively, its effect on the westward movement of population and the regional and secular changes in fertility. Beside immigration, two alternative forces are...

Low sex ratios are often equated with unfavorable marriage prospects for women, but in France after World War 1, the marriage probability of single females rose 50%, despite a massive drop in the male/female ratio. We conjecture that the war-time birth-rate bust induced an abnormal postwar...

The decision to look for a job, as well as some measures of income inequality, are closely connected with the living arrangements people choose and, therefore, are important to policymakers.

Online appendix for the Review of Economic Dynamics article

We document that age profiles of labor earnings for college- and high-school-educated workers are flatter for recent cohorts than for older cohorts. Workers who were 20-year old in 1940 saw their annual earnings increase four-fold over the course of their working lives. For workers who were...

An average person born in the United States in the second half of the nineteenth century completed 7 years of schooling and spent 58 hours a week working in the market. By contrast, an average person born at the end of the twentieth century completed 14 years of schooling and spent 40 hours a...

Between 1940 and 2000 there has been a substantial increase of educational attainment in the United States. What caused this trend? We develop a model of human capital accumulation that features a non-degenerate distribution of educational attainment in the population. We use this framework to...