The potential economic returns to the demographic transition are high. As countries move from a steady state with high mortality and high fertility to an equilibrium with low mortality and fewer children, lower dependency ratios, higher investment in human and physical capital as well as...

We estimate the effect of fertility on female labor force participation in a cross-country panel data set using abortion legislation as an instrument for fertility. We find a large negative effect of the fertility rate on female labor force participation. The direct effect is concentrated among...

The world’s population is growing older, leading us into uncharted demographic waters. There will be higher absolute numbers of elderly people, a larger share of elderly, longer healthy life expectancies, and relatively fewer numbers of working-age people. There are alarmist views – both...

In 1994 the World Bank called East Asia's strong economic growth performance a "miracle". Trade openness, high savings rates, human capital accumulation, and macroeconomic policy only explained part of this growth performance; the remainder was left unexplained. Research in the ensuing years has...

The decline in the total fertility rate between 1960 and 2005, coupled with an increase in life expectancy and the dynamic evolution of past variation in birth and death rates, is producing a significant shift in age structure in Asia. The age distribution has shifted from one with a high...

The last 150 years have been a period of unusual demographic change. Baby booms occurred in the aftermath of wars in some countries. In others, baby booms occurred as a result of falling infant mortality rates and subsequent reductions in fertility. Baby boom generations produce an echo, in the...

We analyze the tradeoff between child quantity and quality in developing countries by estimating the effect of family size on child education in urban Philippines. To isolate exogenous changes in family size, we exploit a policy shock: in the late 1990s, the mayor of Manila enacted a municipal...

Lower fertility can translate into a more male-biased sex ratio if son preference is persistent and technology for sex-selection is easily accessible. This paper investigates whether financial incentives can overcome this trade-off in the context of an Indian scheme, Devirupak, that seeks to...

Little is known about the response behavior of parents whose children are exposed to an early-life shock. In this paper we interpret the prenatal exposure of the Austrian 1986 cohort to radioactive fallout from the Chernobyl accident as a negative human capital shock and examine their parents'...

We examine the effect of joint custody on marriage, divorce, fertility and female employment in Austria using individual-level administrative data, covering the entire population. We also use unique data obtained from court records to analyze the effect on post-divorce outcomes. Our estimates...