Fertility, mortality and the developed world's demographic transition

Human Capital, Mortality and Fertility: A Unified Theory of the Economic and Demographic Transition

Human Capital, Mortality and Fertility: A Unified Theory of the Economic and Demographic Transition This paper provides a unified theory of the economic and demographic transition. Individuals make optimal decisions about fertility, education of their children and the type and intensity of the investments in their own education. These decisions are affected by different dimensions of mortality ...

The Declines in Infant Mortality and Fertility: Evidence from British Cities in Demographic Transition

The Declines in Infant Mortality and Fertility: Evidence from British Cities in Demographic Transition At the beginning of the twentieth century Britain was roughly halfway through a 60-year demographic transition with declining infant mortality and birth rates. Cities exhibited great and strongly correlated diversity in these rates. We demonstrate cross-section correlations with, for instance,...

The End of the Fertility Transition in the Developed World

Fertility, Human Capital, and Economic Growth over the Demographic Transition

Do low fertility and population aging lead to economic decline if couples have fewer children, but invest more in each child? By addressing this question, this article extends previous work in which the authors show that population aging leads to an increased demand for wealth that can, under some conditions, lead to increased capital per worker and higher per capita consumption. This article i...

How does variance in fertility change over the demographic transition?

Most work on the human fertility transition has focused on declines in mean fertility. However, understanding changes in the variance of reproductive outcomes can be equally important for evolutionary questions about the heritability of fertility, individual determinants of fertility and changing patterns of reproductive skew. Here, we document how variance in completed fertility among women (4...