The Dynamics of Fertility and Growth: Baby Boom, Bust and Bounce-Back
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Creina Day
Abstract
This paper examines the dynamic interplay between economic growth and fertility as a developed economy moves through two distinct phases: women at home and raising children full time; women entering the work force and raising children part time. Women's relative wages rise with economic growth, as per Galor and Weil (1996). Higher wages make children more affordable. On the other hand, children are more costly when maternal time, used in child rearing, could be supplied to the labor market. I extend Galor and Weil (1996) by introducing goods and services as a child rearing input. A Constant Elasticity of Substitution (CES) production function for child rearing allows for varying degrees of substitutability between goods and time. The existence of an alternative input to maternal time generates a baby boom-bust cycle: fertility rises in the first phase and falls in the second. Whilst fertility declines unambiguously at the beginning of the second phase, as women enter the labor force, it may bounce-back before reaching a steady state as income effects start to dominate.
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Artikel in diesem Heft
- Advances Article
- Price Stability and Monetary Policy Effectiveness when Nominal Interest Rates are Bounded at Zero
- Contributions Article
- Aggregate Price Changes and Dispersion: A Comparison of the Equity and Goods and Services Markets
- Dissemination of Technology in Market and Planned Economies
- Interest-Rate Smoothing: Monetary Policy Inertia or Unobserved Variables?
- Is the U.S. Aggregate Production Function Cobb-Douglas? New Estimates of the Elasticity of Substitution
- What Does It Take to Explain Procyclical Productivity?
- Endogenous Distribution, Politics, and the Growth-Equity Tradeoff
- Explaining Speculative Expansions
- Tariffs, Entry Regulation and Markups: Country Size Matters
- Schumpeterian Growth, North-South Trade and Wage Rigidity
- Do Federal Reserve Policy Surprises Reveal Superior Information about the Economy?
- Bailouts and Bank Runs in a Model of Crony Capitalism
- Multiple Equilibria in Heterogeneous Expectations Models
- Topics Article
- Empirical Perspectives on Long-Term External Debt
- Output Gap Uncertainty and Monetary Policy During the 1970s
- The UK Household Sector Demand for Risky Money
- The Relationship between Stock Prices, House Prices and Consumption in OECD Countries
- Labor Market Performance and Flexibility: Which Comes First?
- A Simple Locally Interactive Model of Ergodic and Nonergodic Growth
- Do Minimum Wages Raise the NAIRU?
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- Creative Destruction and Policy in a Model of Endogenous Growth
- Intergenerational Habits, Fiscal Policy, and Welfare
- Output Composition of the Monetary Policy Transmission Mechanism in Japan
- Socio-Cultural Variables and Economic Success: Evidence from Italian Provinces 1951-1991
- Monetary Policy and the Information Content of the Yield Spread
- The Dynamics of Fertility and Growth: Baby Boom, Bust and Bounce-Back
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- Assessing Aggregate Tests of Efficiency for Dynamic Economies
- The Output Gap, Expected Future Inflation and Inflation Dynamics: Another Look
- Unions and Workforce Adjustment Costs