This paper analyzes the relationship between age-specific fertility, mortality and real wages in Sweden during the demographic transition. We take an overlapping generations model of life cycle fertility and fit it to actual Swedish time-series data over the past two and a half centuries. The...

Ireland's relatively late and feeble fertility transition remains poorly understood. The leading explanations stress the role of Catholicism and a conservative social ethos. This paper reports the first results from a project that uses new samples from the 1911 census of Ireland to study...

We examine the roots of variation in corruption across societies, and we argue that marriage practices and family structure are an important, overlooked determinant of corruption. By shaping patterns of relatedness and interaction, marriage practices influence the relative returns to norms of...

This is a rejoinder to a comment by Profs. Cutler and Miller (CM) on a recent paper of ours, “Public Health Efforts and the Decline in Urban Mortality” (NBER WP No. 25027), in which we examine the effect of water filtration on infant and total mortality using the same data as were used by CM...

What caused the baby boom? And, can it be explained within the context of the secular decline in fertility that has occurred over the last 200 years? The hypothesis is that: (i) The secular decline in fertility is due to the relentless rise in real wages that increased the opportunity cost of...

Recent studies based on 20th century US data conclude that abortion access raises children's average socioeconomic outcomes. We generalize a model of fertility, highlighting assumptions under which these abortion predictions can be reversed. Using 19th century abortion restrictions, we...

The scale of the persistent, concentrated immigration from Mexico is a source of concern to many in the United States. The perception is that Mexicans are not assimilating into mainstream America as previous generations of immigrants did. In this paper, we look at the emigration of approximately...

This inquiry examines the role of federal policy in gender inequality using the principles of institutional adjustment (Foster 1981; Bush 1987) in the context of the Veblenian dichotomy of habit formation. Specifically, the authors assert that Social Security, though exclusive at its inception in...

When married daughters leave their parental home and their married brothers do not, altruistic parents provide dowries for daughters and bequests for sons in order to mitigate a free riding problem between their married sons and daughters. The theory has predictions on the form of the dowry...

The 19th and 20th centuries saw a transformation in contraceptive technologies and their take up. This led to a sexual revolution, which witnessed a rise in premarital sex and out-of-wedlock births, and a decline in marriage. The impact of contraception on married and single life is analyzed...