Prior to the famous One Child Policy, China's total fertility rate declined by more than 50% during the 1970s - one of the most rapid sustained fertility declines documented in modern history. Coinciding with this transition was China's first national population policy, Wan Xi Shao, also known...

We provide evidence that lower fertility can simultaneously increase income per capita and lower carbon emissions, eliminating a trade-off central to most policies aimed at slowing global climate change. We estimate the effect of lower fertility on carbon emissions accounting for the fact that...

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 investigates how fertility responds to changes in the price of a marginal child and in household income. We construct a large, individual-level panel data set of married Israeli women during the period 1999-2005 that contains fertility histories and detailed controls. We exploit...

Is there an economic rationale for pronatalist policies? In this paper we propose and analyze a particular market failure that may lead to inefficiently low equilibrium fertility and therefore to a need for government intervention. The friction we investigate is related to the ownership of...

There is longstanding debate in population policy about the relationship between modern contraception and abortion. Although theory predicts that they should be substitutes, the existing body of empirical evidence is difficult to interpret. What is required is a large-scale intervention that...

Two competing explanations for why consumers have trouble with financial decisions are gaining momentum. One is that people are financially illiterate since they lack understanding of simple economic concepts and cannot carry out computations such as computing compound interest, which could...

This is the introduction and summary to the fifth phase of an ongoing project on Social Security Programs and Retirement Around the World. The first phase described the retirement incentives inherent in plan provisions and documented the strong relationship across countries between social...

How households draw down their balances in personal retirement accounts (PRAs) such as 401(k) plans and IRAs can have an important effect on retirement income security and on federal income tax revenues. This paper examines the withdrawal behavior of retirement-age households in the SIPP and...

This paper constructs a structural retirement model with hyperbolic preferences and uses it to estimate the effect of several potential policy changes. Estimated effects of policies are compared under hyperbolic and standard exponential preferences. Sophisticated hyperbolic discounters may...