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...

We develop a model of technological progress and knowledge transmission in the Malthusian era. Given low literacy rates, codified knowledge and formal education were much less important than today. Instead, most knowledge was directly acquired from elders. In knowledge-intensive areas, this...

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) fertility of...

We consider an economy populated by males and females, both rich and poor. The society has to choose one of the following marriage institutions: polygamy, strict monogamy, and serial monogamy (divorce and remarriage). Preferences are aggregated through a voting process. After having identified...

We explore the complementarities between high-skill emigration and poverty in developing countries. We build a model endogenizing human capital accumulation, high-skill migration and productivity. Depending on the magnitude of the key elasticities, the model economy displays a unique stable...

Neglecting the interactions between pension reforms and labour market frictions leads to an underestimation of the effects of such reforms.

face a second trade-off in allocating their time between increasing their own human capital and rearing children. The model displays different regimes. In a Malthusian regime with no education fertility increases with adult life expectancy. In the modern growth regime, life expectancy and...

Tradable permits are now widely used to control pollution. We investigate the implications of setting up such a system in another field -- population control --, either domestically or at the global level. We first generalize the framework with both tradable procreation allowances and tradable...

In most democracies, the majority of education expenditures is financed by the government. In non-democracies, we observe a wide variation in the mix of public and private funding of education. In addition, countries with high inequality tend to rely more heavily on private schooling. We develop...

The transition from economic stagnation to sustained growth is often modelled with a "population-induced" technical progress which raised the return to human capital. In this literature the effect of population on productivity is assumed instead of being derived from more primary assumptions,...