A stylized fact of modern growth is that as countries become richer, education levels rise while family size decreases. This paper provides evidence that well before the onset of modern growth, changes in the return to education affected household choice of children's quantity versus quality....

In this paper, we generalize the notion of Pareto-efficiency to make it applicable to environments with endogenous populations. Two efficiency concepts are proposed, P-efficiency and A-efficiency. The two concepts differ in how they treat people who are not born. We show how these concepts...

The Japanese are becoming older. Americans are also becoming older. Demographic stress in Japan, measured by the dependency ratio (DR), is currently about 0.64. In the immediate pre-WWII era it was even higher because Japan's total fertility rate (TFR) was in the 4 to 5 range. As the TFR began...

We present a model of efficient regulation along the lines of Demsetz (1967). In this model, setting up and running regulatory institutions takes a fixed cost, and therefore jurisdictions with larger populations affected by a given regulation are more likely to have them. Consistent with the...

This paper and its companion study, Fehr, Jokisch, and Kotlikoff (2004), develop a three-region dynamic general equilibrium life-cycle model to analyze general and skill-specific immigration policy during the demographic transition. The three regions are the U.S., Japan, and the EU. Immigration...

Two recently improved sets of cross-country panel data are combined in orderto re-examine the effects of population growth and fertility on economicgrowth. Using a 107 country panel data set covering 1960-85, we find thathigh birth rates appear to reduce economic growth through investment...

Fertility change is distinct from other forms of social and economic change because it directly alters the size and composition of the next generation. This paper studies how changes in population composition over the fertility transition feed back into the evolution of average fertility across...

Despite being key to theories of economic growth and the demographic transition, evidence on how fertility responds to aggregate income change is mixed. We analyze economic growth and fertility change in the developing world over six decades, using data on 2.3 million women from 255 surveys in...

I argue in this paper for more interaction between economic history and economic development. Both subfields study economic development; the difference is that economic history focuses on high-wage countries while economic development focuses on low-wage economies. My argument is based on recent...