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...

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...

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...

This study assesses the short and long-run behaviour of long-term sovereign bond yields in OECD countries, for the period 1973-2008. We employ a dynamic panel approach to reflect financial and economic integration, and to increase the performance and accuracy of the tests. Given the existence of...

We study sovereign bond yields in OECD countries with a dynamic panel by checking for cross-section dependence; assessing panel cointegration; and estimating panel error-correction models. The results show that markets consider budgetary and external imbalances and inflation as relevant...

Fiscal sustainability is a central topic for most of the transition economics of Eastern Europe. This paper focuses on a particular country : Poland. The main purpose is to investigate, empirically, whether the post-transition fiscal policy is consistent with the intertemporal budget constraint,...