In traditional societies it is often argued that parents' desire for old age security in the form of transfers from their children provides an important motive for childbearing. Some doubt has been cast on this "old age security hypothesis" by recent estimates which suggest that the rate of...

Much of Africa has not yet gone through a "demographic transition" to reduced mortality and fertility rates. The fact that the continent's countries remain mired in a Malthusian crisis of high mortality, high fertility, and rapid population growth (with an accompanying state of chronic extreme...

In this paper, we generalize the notion of Pareto-efficiency to make it applicable to environments with endogenous populations. Two efficiency concepts are proposed, P-efficiency and A-efficiency. The two concepts differ in how they treat people who are not born. We show how these concepts...

This paper argues that the secular decline in mortality, which began during the eighteenth century, is still in progress and will probably continue for another century or more. The evolutionary perspective presented in this paper focuses not only on the environment, which from the standpoint of...

We provide evidence that lower fertility can simultaneously increase income per capita and lower carbon emissions, eliminating a trade-off central to most policies aimed at slowing global climate change. We estimate the effect of lower fertility on carbon emissions accounting for the fact that...

The demographic transition and economic growth in the Pacific Rim / Andrew Mason, Ronald Lee, and Sang-Hyop Lee ; comments: Jocelyn E. Finlay, Jong-Wha Lee -- Population aging and economic growth in Asia / David E. Bloom, David Canning, and Jocelyn E. Finlay ; comments: Roberto S. Mariano,...

We examine how the net worth of billionaires relates to their looks, as rated by 16 people of different gender and ethnicity. Surprisingly, their financial assets are unrelated to their beauty; nor are they related to their educational attainment. As a group, however, billionaires are both more...

How does one's place of residence affect individual behavior and long-run outcomes? Understanding neighborhood and place effects has been a leading question for social scientists during the past half-century. Recent empirical studies using experimental and quasi-experimental research designs...

Many committees--juries, political task forces, etc.--spend time gathering costly information before reaching a decision. We report results from lab experiments focused on such information-collection processes. We consider decisions governed by individuals and groups and compare how voting rules...