Women can bear own children or adopt them. Extending economic theories of fertility, we provide a first theoretical treatment of the demand for adoption. We show that the propensity to adopt a child increases in the degree of own altruism, infertility, relatedness to the child, costs of own...

In belligerent countries, male-to-female sex ratios at birth increased during and shortly after the two world wars. These rises occurred amidst dramatically changed marriage-market conditions caused by war-related declines in adult sex ratios, and still defy explanation. Based on county-level...

We introduce a simple method for computing value functions. The method is demonstrated by solving for transitional dynamics in the Uzawa and Lucas endogenous growth model. We use the value function approach to solve both the social planner’s optimization problem in the centralized economy and...