Powerful currents have reshaped the structure of families over the last century. There has been (i) a dramatic drop in fertility and greater parental investment in children; (ii) a rise in married female labor-force participation; (iii) a decline in marriage and a rise in divorce; (iv) a higher...

Fertility in the United States rose from a low of 2.27 children for women born in 1908 to a peak of 3.21 children for women born in 1932. It dropped to a new low of 1.74 children for women born in 1949, before stabilizing for subsequent cohorts. We propose a novel explanation for this...

We argue that one major cause of the U.S. postwar baby boom was the increased demand for female labor during World War II. We develop a quantitative dynamic general equilibrium model with endogenous fertility and female labor-force participation decisions. We use the model to assess the...

The United States has experienced over the past forty years an apparent correspondence between the pattern of retirement among men aged 55-69, and the proportion of workers aged 25-34 working part-year and/or part-time. The latter was an effect of overcrowding among the baby boomers as they...

Older women's patterns of labor supply over the past forty years have differed markedly from those of younger women. Their labor force participation declined sharply during a period of rapid increase for younger women, and then increased significantly while younger women's plateaued and even...

I develop an equilibrium, a two-sided search model of marriage with endogenous population growth, to study the interaction between fertility, the age structure of the population and the age of men and women at first marriage. Within a simple two-period overlapping generation model, I show that...

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...

In this paper, we study the development and underlying drivers of skill premiums in Germany between 1980 and 2008. We show that the significant increase in the medium to low skill wage premiums since the late 1980s was almost exclusively concentrated among the group of workers aged 30 or below....

In this paper, we study the development and underlying drivers of skill premiums in Germany between 1980 and 2008. We show that the significant increase in the medium to low skill wage premiums since the late 1980s was almost exclusively concentrated among the group of workers aged 30 or below....