This paper is the first empirical framework that explains the phenomenon of fast growth combined with the demographic transition occurring in the United States since 1860. I propose a structural model that unifies those events through the role of education: the key feature is that parental...

This paper presents a historical database on educational attainment in 74 countries for the period 1870-2010, using perpetual inventory methods before 1960 and then the Cohen and Soto (2007) database. The correlation between the two sets of average years of schooling in 1960 is equal to 0.96. We...