This paper challenges conventional wisdom by arguing that greater longevity may have contributed less than previously thought for the significant accumulation of human capital during the transition from stagnation to growth. This is because when parents make choices over the quantity and quality...

This paper explores the evolution of child labor, fertility, and human capital in the process of development. In early stages of development the economy is in a development trap where child labor is abundant, fertility is high and output per capita is low. Technological progress, however,...

The pattern of joining the labor force only at an advanced stage of the life-cycle was widespread among American women in the 1960s and 1970s, but not since the 1980s. To explain this change we conduct a theoretical analysis of the interrelation between women's lifetime labor supply choices and...

How does women's empowerment affect fertility and children’s education? In a dramatic revolution, U.S. states gave economic rights to married women between 1850-1920. Prior to this "women's liberation," married women were subject to the laws of coverture, which granted the husband virtually...

Baudin et al. (2015) document that childlessness rates in the U.S. in 1990 exhibit a U-shaped relationship with women’s education, with highly educated women much more likely to be childless than other women. We show that this is no longer true: the highly educated women’s childlessness rate...

Conventional wisdom suggests that increased life expectancy had a key role in causing a rise in investment in human capital. I incorporate the retirement decision into a version of Ben-Porath's (1967) model and find that a necessary condition for this causal relationship to hold is that...

This article challenges conventional wisdom by arguing that greater longevity cannot explain the significant accumulation of human capital during the transition from stagnation to growth. This is because greater longevity raises children’s future income proportionally at all levels of...

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...

Recent growth theories have utilized the Ben-Porath (1967) mechanism according to which prolonging the period in which individuals may receive returns on their investment spurs investment in human capital and cause growth. An important, though sometime implicit implication of these models is...

This paper challenges conventional wisdom by arguing that greater longevity may have contributed less than previously thought for the significant accumulation of human capital during the transition from stagnation to growth. This is because when parents make choices over the quantity and quality...