We examine within a life-cycle set-up the choice of health and retirement. Health care contributes to a reduction in both mortality, determining the need to accumulate retirement wealth, and in morbidity, determining the disutility of work. The retirement age affects health through the value of...

Just as poverty analysis has a central part in Development Economics, studies of fertility behaviour have an equally important standing in the Demography literature. Poverty and fertility are two important aspects of welfare that are closely related. In this paper we use unique longitudinal data...

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...

In this paper, we discuss the role of a diverse set of policies aimed at regulating the number and age structure of elections on the size and age structure of five European Academies of Sciences, namely the Austrian, Berlin-Brandenburg, Russian and Norwegian academies and the Royal Society. We...

The purpose of this article is to identify the role of population size, population growth and population ageing in models of endogenous economic growth. While in exogenous growth models demographic variables are linked to economic prosperity mainly via the population size, the structure of the...

In a hierarchical organisation of stable size the annual intake is strictly determined by the number of deaths and a statutory retirement age (if there is one). In this paper we reconstruct the population of the Austrian Academy of Sciences from 1847 to 2005. For the Austrian Academy of Sciences...

Empirical studies indicate that the transition to parenthood is influenced by an individual's peer group. To study the mechanisms that create interdependencies across individuals' transition to parenthood and its timing we apply an agent-based simulation model. We build a one-sex model and...

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...

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 effect of fertility on household welfare at the micro level. In...

Recent studies on fertility in Europe indicate the changing cross-country correlation between fertility and key fertility-related indicators. Fertility now tends to be lowest in countries that are traditional, catholic and family oriented, while fertility is highest in countries with high...