Aging of the population will affect the growth path of all countries. To assess the historical and future importance of this claim we use two popular approaches and evaluate their merits and disadvantages by confronting them to Swedish data. We first simulate an endogenous growth model with...

We explore the hypothesis that demographic changes started in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are the root of the acceleration in growth rates at the dawn of the modern age. During this period, life tables for Geneva and Venice show a decline in adult mortality; French marriage...

We study how mortality reductins and income growth interact, looking at their relationship prior to the Industrial Revolution, when income per capita was stagnant. We first present a model of individual medical spending giving a rationale for individual health expenditures even when medicine...

We develop a theory of marriage and fertility, distinguishing the choice to have children from the choice of the number of children. The deep parameters of the model are identified from the 1990 US Census. We measure voluntary and involuntary childlessness, and explain why (1) single women are...

We built a unique dataset of 300,000 famous people born between Hammurabi's epoch and 1879, Einstein's birth year. It includes, among other variables, the vital dates, occupations, and locations of celebrities from the Index Bio-bibliographicus Notorum Hominum (IBN), a very comprehensive...

This paper shows that the development from an agricultural regime through industrialization to a manufacturing regime occurs simultaneously to the demographic transition and the change in labor structure towards an increasing fraction of skilled labor due to technological progress. The...

The transition from economic stagnation to sustained growth is often modelled thanks to "population-induced" productivity improvements, which are assumed rather than derived from primary assumptions. In this paper the effect of population on productivity is derived from optimal behavior. More...

We propose a new theory of the demographic transition based on the evidence that body development during childhood is an important predictor of adult life expectancy. Fertility, childhood development, longevity, education and income growth all result from individual decisions. Parents face a...

We propose amodelwith some of themain demographic, economic and institutional factors usually considered to matter in the transition to modern growth. We apply our theory to England over the period 1530-1860. We use the model to measure the impact of mortality, population density and...