The effect of education on second births in Hungary: A test of the time-squeeze, selfselection, and partner-effect hypotheses

Abstract Using micro-data from 48 developing countries, this paper studies changes in crosssectional patterns of fertility and child investment over the demographic transition. Before 1960, children from larger families obtained more education, in large part because they had richer and more educated parents. By century's end, these patterns had reversed. Consequently, fertility differentials by income and education historically raised the average education of the next generation, but they now reduce it. Relative to the level of average education, the positive effect of differential fertility in the past exceeded its negative effect in the present. While the reversal of differential fertility is unrelated to changes in GDP per capita, women's work, sectoral composition, or health, roughly half is attributable to rising aggregate education in the parents' generation. The data are consistent with a model in which fertility has a hump-shaped relationship with parental skill, due to a corner solution in which low-skill parents forgo investment in their children. As the returns to child investment rise, the peak of the relationship shifts to the left, reversing the two associations under study.

the returns to parental time investment in children

The transition to a low carbon economy heralds an economic and social transformation that is exciting as well as challenging. The challenges that face India include: enhancing economic opportunities and living standards for a growing population and addressing the environmental threats. In this backdrop, if India is to realize its development goals. the path towards a low-carbon economy is inevitable. Approaching a low-carbon economy is of critical importance as the country evolves its economic development model, adjusts its economic structure, enhances its technological innovation capabilities and strengthens the sustainability of its economy. Using a ''bottom up' ' policy framework for low-carbon growth based on national preferences, possibilities and policies the present study develops a model with two scenarios. One is business-as-usual reference case (BAU) and the other is low-carbon (LC) scenario. We discuss the financing mechanisms and key policy issues. The low-carbon scenario is characterized by increased use of renewables through solar, wind, geothermal, biomass and hydro, which will reduce fossil fuel demand. Also, use of efficient and clean end-use devices in all the sectors will multiply savings. The analysis shows that economy-wide reductions of the order of 30-35 % appear to be technically feasible at reasonable costs, relative to the baseline scenario.

A vast literature has sought to explain large cross-country di¤erences in fertility rates. Income, mortality, urbanization, and female labour force participation, among other socioeconomic vari-ables, have been suggested as explanatory factors for the di¤erences. This paper points out that cross-country di¤erences in fertility rates have fallen very rapidly over the past four decades, with most countries converging to a rate just above two children per woman. This absolute convergence took place despite the limited (or absent) absolute convergence in other economic variables. The rapid decline in fertility rates taking place in developing economies stands in sharp contrast with the slow decline experienced earlier by more mature economies. The preferred number of children has also fallen, suggesting a shift to a small-family norm. The convergence to replacement rates will lead to a stable world population, reducing environmental concerns over explosive popula-tion growth. In this paper we explore existing explanations and bring in an additional factor inuencing fertility rates: the population programs started in the 1960s, which, we argue, have accelerated the global decline in fertility rates over the past four decades.

Environmental policy Population control from production to tax free activities such as procreation and leisure. This natalist bias will deteriorate the environment further, entailing the need to impose ever more d on gas em ll expe deal tions the latter. In general, the literature in climate economics tends to operate under the assumption that demographics is exogenous (adopting for example global population size projections made by major demographic institutions). One

During World War I, the birth rate in France fell by 50 percent. Why? I build a model of fertility choices where the war implies a positive probability that a wife remains alone, a partially-compensated loss of a husband’s income, and a temporary decline in productivity followed by faster growth. I calibrate the model’s key parameters using pre-war data. I find that it accounts for 91 percent of the decline of the birth rate. The main determinant of this result is the loss of expected income associated with the risk that a wife remains alone. (JEL D74, J13, J24, N33, N34, N44) During the First World War (1914–1918) the birth rate in France declined by about 50 percent.1 The resulting deficit in births is estimated to be 1.4 million, which is equal to the estimated loss of French lives due to the war.2 It follows that the decline of the birth rate doubled the already large demographic impact of the war, and its effect on the French demography was noticeable well into the twentieth century. I offer a theory to account for this phenomenon. I develop a model that builds upon Greenwood, Seshadri, and Vandenbroucke (2005). The unit of analysis is a finitely-lived household made of adults and chil-dren. The household derives utility from consumption as well as from the number of children it chooses to have. However, children are costly. They require that the wife devotes a fixed fraction of her productive time to them as long as they remain in the household. In this model, the war matters because the (likely) death of a husband is a pure, negative (expected) income shock. Since children are normal goods, the war negatively affects births. I propose a quantitative exercise consisting of two steps. First, I calibrate the model to fit the time series of the French birth rate from 1800 until the eve of World War I. Second, I use the calibrated model to evaluate the effects of the war on births. I model the war as a change in the environment facing a household along three

Why are people in the richest countries of the world so much richer today than 100 years ago? And why are some countries so much richer than others? Questions such as these define the field of economic growth. This paper documents the facts that underlie these questions. How much richer are we today than 100 years ago, and how large are the income gaps between countries? The purpose of the paper is to provide an encyclopedia of the fundamental facts of economic growth upon which our theories are built, gathering them together in one place and updating the facts with the latest available data. ∗In preparation for a new volume of the Handbook of Macroeconomics. I am grateful to Kevin Bryan,

William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and its partners. The paper summarizes progress-to-date on the research agenda on population, reproductive health, and economic development.

Altruistic individuals regard fertility as a form of longevity. As a result, standard time-separable altruistic models of the type commonly used in macroeconomics cannot account for the evidence of increasing longevity but decreasing fertility as income rises, a puzzle. We show that a non-separable formulation of preferences that allows for a low elasticity of intertemporal substitution (EIS) but a high elasticity of intergenerational substitution (EGS) can explain the longevity-fertility puzzle. The model with a single elasticity cannot account for both. Our results suggests a major role for a new parameter in macro, the EGS. While the EIS mostly inuences short-term economic decisions, the EGS inuences mostly long-term economic choices.