Economic demographers have long analyzed fertility cycles. This paper builds a foundation for these cycles in a model … of fertility choice with dynastic altruism and aggregate shocks. It is shown that under reasonable parameter values …, fertility is pro-cyclical and that, following a shock, fertility continues to cycle endogenously as subsequent cohorts enter …

We use an extended Barro-Becker model of endogenous fertility, in which parents are heterogeneous in their labor …

In this chapter we revisit the relationship between income and fertility. There is overwhelming empirical evidence that … fertility is negatively related to income in most countries at most times. Several theories have been proposed in the literature …

The Barro-Becker model is a simple intuitive model of fertility choice. In its original formulation, however, it has … not been very successful at reproducing the changes in fertility choice in response to decreased mortality and increased … intertemporal elasticity of substitution (IES) typically assumed in the fertility literature. We show that, not only is this …

In this paper, we use data from the US census to document the history of the relationship between fertility choice and … several new facts that should be useful for researchers trying to model fertility. (1) The reduction in fertility known as the … Demographic Transition (or the Fertility Transition) seems to be much sharper based on cohort fertility measures compared to usual …

fertility. What type of model is consistent with this finding? We explore this question using two models of fertility, the one … them with old age transfers. The effect of increases in government provided pensions on fertility in the Barro and Becker … model is very small, and inconsistent with the empirical findings. The effect on fertility in the Boldrin and Jones model is …

who are not born. We show how these concepts relate to the notion of Pareto-efficiency when fertility is exogenous. We …