High-income countries have generally experienced falling fertility in recent decades. In most of these countries, the total fertility rate is now below the level that implies a stable population in the long run. This has led to concerns among economists, policymakers, and the wider public about...

We explore the relationships between subjective well-being and income, as seen across individuals within a given country, between countries in a given year, and as a country grows through time. We show that richer individuals in a given country are more satisfied with their lives than are poorer...

In recent decades, most industrialized countries experienced declining population growth rates caused by declining fertility and associated with rising life expectancy. We analyze the effect of continuing demographic change on medium- and long-run economic growth by setting forth an R&D-based...

We analyze the impact of increasing longevity on technological progress within an R&D-based endogenous growth framework and test the modelś implications on OECD data from 1960 to 2011. The central hypothesis derived in the theoretical part is that - by raising the incentives of households to...

Many scholars have argued that once "basic needs" have been met, higher income is no longer associated with higher in subjective well-being. We assess the validity of this claim in comparisons of both rich and poor countries, and also of rich and poor people within a country. Analyzing multiple...

We assess Africa's prospects for enjoying a demographic dividend. While fertility rates and dependency ratios in Africa remain high, they have started to decline. According to UN projections, they will fall further in the coming decades such that by the mid-21st century the ratio of the...

We analyze the economic consequences for less developed countries of investing in female health. In so doing we introduce a novel micro-founded dynamic general equilibrium framework in which parents trade off the number of children against investments in their education and in which we allow for...

Policy makers find it difficult to promote economic development through entrepreneurship and SMEs. In this paper we argue that this is because the positive impact of entrepreneurship is overestimated and its negative impact underestimated. It is moreover also because there is no unified...

We analyze the effects of declining population growth on automation. A simple theoretical model of capital accumulation predicts that countries with lower population growth introduce automation technologies earlier. We test the theoretical prediction on panel data for 60 countries over the time...

At the close of World War II, there were wide-ranging debates about the future of economic developments. Historical experience has since shown that these forecasts were uniformly too pessimistic. Expectations for the American economy focused on the likelihood of secular stagnation; this topic...