Fertility, Education, and Market Failures

We show that coordination failures may be part of an explanation for the demographic differences between rich and poor countries and their differing attitudes towards the use of child labor. Our analysis is carried out within a two-period, general equilibrium model with endogenous fertility, parental investment in children’s education and ?rms’ tradeoff between traditional technologies and the adoption of skill-intensive, modern ones. The model exhibits multiple equilibria due to the lack of a coordination mechanism between parental decisions on the quantity and the quality of children and entrepreneurs’ technology choices.