This paper formulates a simple skill and education model to explain how better access to higher education leads to stronger assortative mating on skills of parents and more polarized skill and earnings distributions of children. Swedish data show that in the second half of the 20th century more...

In this paper we identify the effects of ageing on the relative price of nontradeables versus tradeables. We consider two cases. In a first specification, age effects only account for short-run dynamics. An alternative case allows for permanent age effects. Estimating the respective cases by...

How does global aging affect the convergence in global economic development? Both the developing and developed world will be characterized for the coming decades by aging populations. Changes in the age distribution of a population are an important determinant of economic performance as they...

The paper presents an approach which thoroughly assesses the role of early life and contemporaneous macro-conditions in explaining health at older ages. In particular, we investigate the role of exposure to infectious diseases and economic conditions during infancy and childhood, as well as the...

We analyze the effect of economic conditions early in life on individual mortality rate later in life, using business cycle conditions early in life as an exogenous indicator. Individual records from Dutch registers of birth, marriage, and death, covering a window of unprecedented size...

This article uses China's family planning policies to quantify and explain spillovers in fertility decisions. We test whether ethnic minorities decreased their fertility in response to the policies, although only the majority ethnic group, the Han Chinese, were subject to birth quotas. We...

We use newly collected individual-level hunger recall information from the China Family Panel Survey to estimate the causal effect of undernourishment on later-life health. We develop a Two-Sample Instrumental Variable (TSIV) estimator that can deal with heterogeneous samples. We find a...

We introduce a measure of population health that is sensitive to dispersion in both agespecific health and lifespan. The measure generalises health-adjusted life expectancy without requiring more data. A transformation of change in the measure gives a distributionally sensitive monetary...

In the Netherlands, an immediate baby boom followed the end of WWII and the baby bust of the 1930s. I propose a novel application of the bunching methodology to examine whether the war shifted the timing of fertility or changed women's completed fertility. I disaggregate the number of births by...

In recent years there has been a growing interest in the impact of inequality on economic growth. Both theoretical and empirical approaches have produced ambiguous results on sign and size of this relationship. Although there is a considerable part of the literature that considers inequality...