This paper constructs a two-sector unified growth model. Learning-by-doing in agriculture eventually allows the preindustrial economy to leave its Malthusian trap. But entrepreneurs in the manufacturing sector do not attempt invention if not much is known about natural phenomena. This delays the...

This paper constructs a two-sector unified growth model that explains the timing and the inevitability of an industrial revolution through entrepreneurs’ role for the accumulation of useful knowledge. While learning-by-doing in agriculture eventually allows the preindustrial economy to leave...

This paper reviews Gary Becker's contributions to the economic analysis of fertility, from his 1960 paper introducing the quantity-quality tradeoff to later work linking the economics of fertility to the theory of economic growth.

France experienced the demographic transition before richer and more educated countries. This paper offers a novel explanation for this puzzle that emphasizes the diffusion of culture and information through internal migration. It tests how migration affected fertility by building a decennial...

This paper assesses the causal impact of greater market access on demographic transition during the latter half of the 19th century in the United States. We construct new measures of fertility changes and measures of railroad access at the county level from 1850 - 1890. We are able to document...

This paper studies the dynamics of fertility in 180 countries in the period 1950ñ 2015 and investigates the determinants of the onset of fertility transitions. The application of Phillips and Sulís (2007) test to fertility rates provides evidence of convergence in three groups of countries....

The transition from stagnation to growth and the associated phenomenon of the great divergence have been the subject of an intensive research in the growth literature in recent years. The discrepancy between the predictions of exogenous and endogenous growth models and the process of development...

Childhood vaccines can increase population growth in the short term by improving the survival rates of young children. Over the long run, reductions in child mortality rates are associated with lower demand for children and fertility rates (known as "demographic transition"). Vaccines can...

The demographic transition -the move from a high fertility/high mortality regime into a low fertility/low mortality regime- is one of the most fundamental transformations that countries undertake. To study demographic transitions across time and space, we compile a data set of birth and death...

Using data from the China Family Panel Studies, this paper exploits the Compulsory Education Law of China implemented in the 1980s to empirically examine the causal impact of women's education on fertility in rural China by difference-in-differences methods. The results show that an additional...