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 order to study the macroeconomic effects of public finances, we construct a computable general equilibrium model with overlapping generations, endogenous growth and endogenous retirement age. We calibrate this model on Belgian data. We show that it is able to replicate the observed increase...