This paper uses multiple data sources and a unified methodology to estimate the trends and levels of the U.S. high school graduation rate. Correcting for important biases that plague previous calculations, we establish that (a) the true high school graduation rate is substantially lower than the...

Do populations grow as countries become richer? In this paper we estimate the effects on population growth of shocks to national income that are plausibly exogenous and unlikely to be driven by technological change. For a panel of over 139 countries spanning the period 1960-2007 we interact...

In this document, we consider the effects of a land reform on economic and demographic growth by a family-optimization model with sharecropping, endogenous fertility and status seeking. We show that tenant farming is the major obstacle to escaping the Malthusian trap with high fertility and low...

This paper contributes to the already vast literature on demography-induced international capital flows by examining the role of labor market imperfections and institutions. We setup a two-country overlapping generations model with search unemployment, which we calibrate on EU15 and US data....

Dynamic adjustments could be a useful strategy for mitigating the costs of acute environmental shocks when timing is not a strictly binding constraint. To investigate whether such adjustments could apply to fertility, we estimate the effects of temperature shocks on birth rates in the United...

This paper assesses the causal impact of greater market access on demographic transition during the latter half of the 19th century in the United States. We construct new measures of fertility changes and measures of railroad access at the county level from 1850 - 1890. We are able to document...

This paper explores the mobility patterns of elder workers in the United States, with a focus on mobility to and from work (e.g., commuting) across metropolitan areas and metropolitan population sizes. Using detailed time diaries from the American Time Use Survey for the years 2003-2018,...

This article examines pollution and environmental mortality in an economy where fertility is endogenous and output is produced from labor and capital by two sectors, dirty and clean. An emission tax curbs dirty production, which decreases pollution-induced mortality but also shifts resources to...

Paul Samuelson made a series of important contributions to population theory for humans and other species, evolutionary theory, and the theory of age structured life cycles in economic equilibrium and growth. The work is highly abstract but much of it was intended to illuminate issues of...

Marriage patterns of immigrants are an important indicator of the degree of immigrant integration into their host countries. Literature on the economics of the household has focused on the role of the sex-ratio as an important determining factor in marriage market outcomes. Therefore, it is...