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...

In a neoclassical economy with endogenous capital- and labor-augmenting technical change the steady-state growth rate of output per worker is shown to increase in the elasticity of substitution between capital and labor. This confirms the assessment of Klump and de La Grandville (2000) that the...

We study the effect of a declining labor force on the incentives to engage in labor-saving technical change and ask how this effect is influenced by institutional characteristics of the pension scheme. When labor is scarcer it becomes more expensive and innovation investments that increase labor...

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...