This paper provides a unified theory of the economic and demographic transition. The main mechanism is based on optimal decisions about fertility and time investments in heterogeneous types of human capital. These decisions depend on different dimensions of health, which themselves are...

This paper quantifies the size of precautionary savings implied by a dynamic general equilibrium model with heterogeneous agents when explicitly considering the labor supply decision of households. I find that precautionary savings are smaller than if they were measured by use of a model economy...

Recent growth papers have utilized the Ben-Porath 1967 mechanism according to which prolonging the period in which individuals may receive returns on their investment spurs investment in human capital and cause growth. Implicitly, one implication of these models is that total labor input over...

Over the last fifty years, home production output may have changed significantly due to dramatic increases in women's time allocation to market work. It is important to quantify this change: to the extent that increases in GDP derive from new time allocation patterns, failure to measure...

Approximately four out of ten American children experience the divorce of their parents. This raises concern because studies in sociology, developmental psychology, and economics show that offspring of divorced parents fare worse than offspring of married parents. The belief that a two-parent...