This paper shows that differences in fertility across European countries mainly emerge in the transition from the first to the second child and that childcare services enabling women to work are an important determinant for this transition to occur. The theoretical framework proposed accounts...

Beyond natural sterility, there are two main types of childlessness: one driven by poverty and another by the high opportunity cost to child-rearing. We argue that taking childlessness and its causes into account matters for assessing the impact of development policies on fertility. We measure...

Very few studies have explored the optimality properties of the "standard model" of fertility where parents must determine their optimal trade-off between quality and quantity. The present paper works to fill that gap and find three main results. First, when there exist positive externalities in...

This paper studies the impact of low-skilled immigration on the host country’s education system, which is characterized by sources of school funding, expenditres per pupil, and types of parents who are more likely to send children to publicly (privately) funded schools. When the size of...

The Easter Island tragedy has become an allegory for ecological catastrophe and a warning for the future. In the economic literature the collapse is usually attributed to irrational or myopic behaviors in the context of a fragile ecosystem. In this paper we propose an alternative story involving...

In this article, I examine the large Black / White fertility gap in the US. I question the "compositional argument" according to which differences in socioeconomic characteristics would be the main driver of this gap. Indeed, once controlled for education, other characteristics such as income,...

I enrich the findings according to which cultural proxies such as past total fertility rates in the country of origin or number of siblings have a sizable effect on the fertility choice of second generation migrants. I use the TeO survey that interviewed individuals established in France from...

This paper quantitatively investigates the short- and long-run effects of liberalizing global migration on the world distribution of income. We develop and parametrize a dynamic model of the world economy with endogenous migration, fertility and education decisions. We identify bilateral...

Among possible lifestyles, the DINKs (“double income no kids”) are couples choosing to be childless, while the DEWKs (“dually employed with kids”) are couples with children. We develop a theory of marriage and parenthood decisions, where we distinguish the choice to have children from...

Abstract: The first challenge for economic growth theory is to understand the transition from stagnation to growth at the time of the Industrial Revolution and in particular to identify the main factor(s) that triggered the take-off. Doing so also helps to understand why there are poor and rich...