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...

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...

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...

This paper develops a monetary endogenous growth overlapping generations model characterized by endogenous longevity and an inflation targeting monetary authority, and analyzes the growth dynamics that emerges from this framework. Besides the endogenous longevity which depends on the...

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...

This paper develops a monetary endogenous growth overlapping generations model characterized by endogenous longevity and an inflation targeting monetary authority, and analyzes the growth dynamics that emerges from this framework. Besides the endogenous longevity which depends on the...

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...

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).