This paper analyzes the long-term economic determinants of the demographic transition using a large panel of countries since 1870. A simple theoretical framework accounts for the possibly nonmonotonic variations of fertility in the course of economic development. As predicted by unified growth...

Less than desirable indigenous birth rates in Western Europe have generated interest toward examining the question of natalism — an organised state initiative to manage and promote reproduction, child rearing, health, as well as related neo-traditional cultural values — from a comparative...

This study uses micro data and an OLG model to show that general equilibrium forces are critical for understanding the relationship between aggregate fertility and household savings. First, we document that parents perceive children as an important source of old-age support and that in partial...

The baby-boom and subsequent baby-bust have shaped much of the history of the second half of the 20th century; yet it is still largely unclear what caused them. This paper presents a new unified explanation of the fertility Boom-Bust that links the latter to the Great Depression and the...

Portugal is characterized by a huge decline in the birth rate, which is a phenomenon that requires - or rather, should already have requested - some kind of intervention, given the consequent costs, including economic, poli- tical and social ones. Despite the evident downward trend in the birth...

The Australian baby bonus, offering parents $3,000 on the birth of a child, was announced on May 11 2004. The focus of this paper is to analyse the response to the policy across maternal age levels in order to separate policy effects from prevailing demographic trends such as recuperation of...

Ever since the very beginning of the Journal of Economics and Statistics, population economics has featured prominently in the Journal. Fertility naturally plays an important role in population economics. Its size has decreased significantly from the 1900s. Long time-series regarding fertility...

This paper is an exploration of the theoretical properties of the Becker fertility model. I demonstrate that the comparative statics of the Becker fertility model with a general budget constraint and its corresponding expenditure model can be expressed in terms of the ordinary consumer...

Different factors are often assigned an important role in the emergence of modern growth, such as the relationship between demographic factors and changes in institutions that promote innovation, the production of new ideas, the development of education or improvements in technology. In this...

We question the received wisdom that birth limitation was absent among historical populations before the fertility transition of the late nineteenth-century. Using duration and panel models on family-level data, we find a causal, negative short-run effect of living standards on birth spacing in...