uncertainty about the number of surviving children. If the marginal utility of a surviving child is convex then there will be a … precautionary demand for children. As the mortality rate and thus uncertainty falls, this demand decreases. Furthermore, lower … mortality encourages educational investment in children. The key result is that this empirically observed quality-quantity trade …

survival, a decline in an exogenous mortality rate reduces precautionary demand for children and increases parental investment … in each child. Once mortality is endogenized, population growth becomes a hump-shaped function of income per capita. At … low levels of income population growth rises as income per capita rises leading to a Malthusian steady-state equilibrium …