Complementing prior research on income and educational mobility, we examine the intergenerational transmission of cognitive abilities. We find that individuals’ cognitive skills are positively related to their parents’ abilities, despite controlling for educational attainment and family...

Despite similar levels of per capita income, education and technology, the development of labour income shares in OECD countries has displayed different patterns since 1960. The paper examines the role of demography in this regard. We first use a standard overlapping generations model to derive...

The present paper discusses the long-run effects of two interdependent relations between economic and population growth. According to a frequently used formulation of the population-push hypothesis, learning-by-doing effects in production lead to increasing returns to scale and, therefore, to a...

The history of preindustrial Europe provides an opportunity to examine the causes and consequences of population change at a macro level. However, serious statistical problems arise from the endogeneity of all observed variables in a Malthusian system (fertility, mortality, population size, and...

The purpose of this article is to construct a theoretical framework characterizing the interactions among economic development, ecosystem equilibrium and possible population decline, and to discuss the population dynamics in the very long run. In our framework, economic activities bridge...

In this paper we show that the macroeconomic effects of demographic changes strongly depend on the degree of altruism and on the specification of the intertemporal utility function. We allow for agents either to be altruistic in the sense of Barro (1974) or non-altruistic. In the latter case,...

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 presents a simultaneous model for the joint decisions of working, studying and leaving the parental household by young people in Spain. Using cross-section data from the 1990-1991 Encuesta de Presupuestos Familiares, the model is estimated by a two stage estimation method. Endogeneity...

A strong positive association between wife abuse in the first marriage and the probability of that marriage ending is documented and investigated using the 1993 Violence Against Women survey (VAWS) for Canada and controlling for the endogeneity of abuse. A sensitivity analysis suggests that...

This paper uses data from the age 33 wave of the British National Child Development Survey (NCDS) to analyze the effects of a parental disruption (divorce or death of a father) on the labour market performance of children when they reach adulthood. The NCDS is a longitudinal study of all...