Focusing just on the fertility aspects of the Easterlin hypothesis, this paper offers a critical assessment - rather than just a selective citation - of the extensive fertility literature generated by Easterlin, and a complete inventory of data and methodologies in seventy-six published...

In this paper we look at a panel of OECD aggregate fertility and labor market data between 1970 and 1995 and we report some striking recent developments. Total Fertility Rates (TFR) were falling and Female Participation Rates (FPR) were increasing, conforming to a well known long-run trend....

A model of fertility choice is studied in which the utility of parents depends on how much they consume, on how many children they have and on the consumption of their children. Hence, parents are altruistic towards their children, but in a more limited sense than in the much discussed dynastic...

The people whose interests are most adversely affected by frequent bearing and rearing of children are young women. Social changes that expand the decisional power of young women (such as expansion of female literacy, or enhancement of female employment opportunity) can, thus, be major forces in...

After an introduction touching on various biographical highlights, this paper summarizes a wide-ranging discussion with Richard Easterlin which occurred in the Autumn of 1996. We considered the Easterlin Hypothesis - its genesis and current status, together with Easterlin`s views on attempts to...

This paper introduces a counterfactual technique to estimate net emigration from Norwegian birth cohorts from 1846 to 1900. A main finding is that despite strong fluctuations in annual emigration, the percentage reduction of each cohort due to emigration was surprisingly stable for all cohorts...

The widely-observed finding in the literature showing little or no relationship between population growth (and dependency) and saving requires modification based on panel and cross-section estimation of aggregate country data. While such a relationship is still weak in the hybrid Leff-type...

This paper estimates the expected length of retirement for each labor market cohort between 1850 and 1990. Since 1850, the expected length of retirement has increased by more than six-fold and now represents up to 30% of male length of life after entry into the labor force. The rise of the...

Economic growth depends on human resources and human needs. The demographic age structure shapes both of these factors. We study five-year data from the OECD countries 1950-1990 in the framework of an age structure augmented neoclassical growth model with gradual technical adjustment. The model...

This paper explores the responses of fertility and nuptiality to fluctuations in real wages and mortality that can be inferred from annual series of English historical data over the period 1542 to 1800. The paper begins with a review of the time series properties of the data and summarizes the...