Several contributions have already pointed out that initial wealth in- equalities do persist in the long run in the Ramsey model with heteroge- nous agents. We show that this result is not robust to the introduction of endogenous fertility. Our argument builds on the Barro-Becker (1989) seminal...

Higher child mortality reduces the willingness of parents to invest in children's education and increases their desired level of fertility. In this context, economic inequality is not only decisive for human capital investments and the emergence of differential fertility, but also for agents'...

Environmental pollution adversely affects children’s probability to survive to adulthood, reduces thus parental expenditures on child quality and increases the number of births necessary to achieve a desired family size. We argue that this mechanism will be intensified by economic inequality...