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...

We explore the consequences of liberalized credit markets for growth and inequality in a lifecycle economy with physical and human capital accumulation, populated by households of different abilities, and calibrated to match the long-run economic performance of a panel of emerging countries....

We assess the merits of different education systems in a framework that accounts for the joint decision problem of parents regarding fertility and education. Specifically, we compare the implications of a public and a private schooing regime for economic growth and inequality; We find that...

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 explore the hypothesis that demographic changes started in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are at the root of the acceleration in growth rates at the dawn of the modern age. During this period, life tables for Geneva and Venice show a decline in adult mortality; French marriage...

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 the...