This paper presents a microfounded theory of long-term development. We model the interplay between economic variables, namely the process of human capital formation and technological progress, and the biological constraint of finite lifetime expectancy. All these processes affect each other and...

Praktisch alle wirtschaftlich entwickelten Länder der Welt sind demokratisch. Sind demokratische Strukturen also kausal für wirtschaftlichen Wohlstand und Wachstum? Oder ist es vielmehr der wirtschaftliche Entwicklungsstand eines Landes, der eine Demokratie erst ermöglicht? Dieser Artikel...

This paper provides a unified theory of the economic and demographic transition. Individuals make optimal decisions about fertility, education of their children and the type and intensity of the investments in their own education. These decisions are affected by different dimensions of mortality...

We present a theory of the economic and demographic transition where adult longevity, child mortality, fertility and the education composition of the population are jointly determined. The model allows for an investigation of the determinants of underdevelopment traps as well as of the mechanism...

In this paper we investigate the causal effect of life expectancy on economic growth by explicitly accounting for the role of the demographic transition. In addition to focusing on issues of empirical identification, this paper emphasizes the role of the econometric specification. We present a...

In this paper we investigate the causal effect of life expectancy on economic growth by explicitly accounting for the role of the demographic transition. In addition to focusing on issues of empirical identification, this paper emphasizes the role of the econometric specification. We present a...

This paper provides a unified theory of the economic and demographic transition. The main mechanism is based on optimal decisions about fertility and time investments in heterogeneous types of human capital. These decisions depend on different dimensions of health, which themselves are...

Acemoglu, Johnson, Robinson, and Yared (2008) document that the cross-country correlation between income per capita and democracy disappears once including country fixed effects. This paper tests the hypothesis that the effect of income on democracy might differ systematically across countries....

We propose a unified growth theory to investigate the mechanics generating the economic and demographic transition, and the role of mortality differences for comparative development. The framework can replicate the quantitative patterns in historical time series data and in contemporaneous...

This note estimates the causal effect of life expectancy on per capita income and tests the hypothesis of a non-monotonic effect using finite mixture models. The results confirm the hypothesis and qualify recent evidence for a negative effect by Acemoglu and Johnson (2007).