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...

One of the economic benefits of immigration is that the diversity of the population is enhanced. Diversity, it is argued, enriches the environment in which individuals live and trade and may contribute to greater creativity. What does diversity mean? Do current immigration policies enhance...

Transitions from high mortality and fertility to low mortality and fertility can be beneficial to economies as large baby boom cohorts enter the workforce and save for retirement, while rising longevity has perhaps increased both the incentive to invest in education and to save for retirement....

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...

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...