Life expectancy around the world has increased substantially since 1970. In contrast, consump-tion per capita has fallen in some countries, remained stagnant, or sharply increased in others.What are the welfare gains of the systematic increase in life expectancy around the world? Howdoes a "full...

Dynastic models common in macroeconomics use a single parameter to control the willingness of individuals to substitute consumption both intertemporally, or across periods, and intergenerationally, or across parents and their children. This paper defines the concept of Elasticity of...

Dynastic models common in macroeconomics use a single parameter to control the willingness of individuals to substitute consumption both intertemporally, or across periods, and intergenerationally, or across parents and their children. This paper defines the concept of Elasticity of...

This paper provides a theory that explains the cross-country distribution of average years of schooling, as well as the so called human capital premium puzzle. In our theory, credit frictions as well as differences in access to public education, fertility and mortality turn out to be the key...

The Barro-Becker model of fertility has three controversial predictions: (i) fertility and schooling are independent of family income; (ii) children are a net financial burden to society; and (iii) individual consumption is negatively associated to individual income. We show that introducing...

The evidence strongly suggests a robust negative relationship between income and fertility, and a positive relationship between income and longevity. This is puzzling for standard dynamic models. For instance, altruistic models that use the most standard preferences in macro --time separable...