David de la Croix

Inequality and growth: why differential fertility matters

We develop a new theoretical link between inequality and growth. In our model, fertility and education decisions are interdependent. Poor parents decide to have many children and invest little in education. A mean-preserving spread in the income distribution increases the fertility differential between the rich and the poor, which implies that more weight gets placed on families who provide little education. Consequently, an increase in inequality lowers average education and, therefore, growth. We find that this fertility-differential effect accounts for most of the empirical relationship between inequality and growth.

Vintage Human Capital, Demographic Trends and Endogenous Growth

We study how economic growth is affected by demographics in an overlapping generations model with a realistic survival law. Individuals optimally chose the dates at which they leave school to enter the labor market and at which they retire. Endogenous growth arises thanks to the accumulation of generation-specific human capital. Favorable shifts in the survival probabilities always induce longer schooling and later retirement but have an ambiguous effect on growth. The relationship between the growth of population and per-capita growth is hump-shaped. Increases in longevity can be responsible for a switch from a no-growth regime to a sustained growth regime and for a positive relationship between fertility and growth to vanish.

Life Expectancy and Endogenous Growth

We consider an overlapping generations model with uncertain lifetime and endogenous growth. Individuals have to choose the length of time devoted to schooling before starting to work. We show that it depends positively on life expectancy but that the positive effect of a longer life on growth could be offset by a decrease in the participation rate. Dynamics are characterized by a delay differential equation and human capital converges with oscillations to a balanced growth path.

Growth, Public Investment and Corruption with Failing Institutions

Corruption is thought to prevent poor countries from catching up with richer ones. We analyze one channel through which corruption hampers growth: public investment can be distorted in favor of specific types of spending for which rent-seeking is easier and better concealed. To study this distortion, we propose a dynamic model where households vote for the composition of public spending, subject to an incentive constraint reflecting individuals’ choice between productive activity and rent-seeking. In equilibrium, the structure of public investment is determined by the predatory technology and the distribution of political power. Among different regimes, the model shows a possible scenario of distortion without corruption in which there is no effective corruption but the possibility of corruption still distorts the allocation of public investment. We test the implications of the model on a set of countries using a two-stage least squares estimation. We find that developing countries with high predatory technology invest more in housing and physical capital in comparison with health and education. The reverse is true for developed countries.

'The Child is Father of the Man:' Implications for the Demographic Transition

face a second trade-off in allocating their time between increasing their own human capital and rearing children. The model displays different regimes. In a Malthusian regime with no education fertility increases with adult life expectancy. In the modern growth regime, life expectancy and fertility move in opposite directions. The dynamics display the key features of the demographic transition, including the hump in both population growth and fertility, and replicate the observed rise in educational attainment, adult life expectancy and economic growth. Consistent with the empirical evidence, a distinctive implication of our theory is that improvements in childhood development precede the increase in education.

Policy reforms and growth in computable OLG economies

We build a computable general equilibrium model with overlapping generations of agents and an endogenous growth specification a la Lucas. Two main issues are addressed: (i) to what extent does endogenous growth play a significant role in the face of policy reforms and (ii) are the simulation results robust to various calibrations of the production function of human capital. In this purpose, we simulate four large policy changes and compare the predictions with endogenous growth (under various parameter sets) to those with exogenous growth. If endogenous growth is important when examining the effects of education reform, it does not really matter with pension reforms and plays a minor role in the debt repayment scenario. These results are very robust to calibration.

Optimal Growth when Tastes are Inherited

We address the issue of optimal growth when standard-of-living aspirations are transmitted from one generation to the next. We derive the condition for the optimal solution to be stable in the saddle-point sense and show that this optimal solution may display damped oscillations even when the planner does not discount the utility of future generations (golden rule case). The decentralization of the optimal solution aims at correcting the inter-generational externality by use of an investment subsidy and allows to avoid socially damaging rushes on consumption in expansion periods. It also allows to stabilize output in the case of competitive economies displaying endogenous fluctuations.

Easter Island's Collapse: A Tale of a Population Race

The Easter Island tragedy has become an allegory for ecological catastrophe and a warning for the future. In the economic literature the collapse is usually attributed to irrational or myopic behavior in the context of a fragile ecosystem. In this paper we propose an alternative story involving non-cooperative bargaining between clans to share the crop. Each clan’s bargaining power depends on its threat level when fighting a war. The biggest group has the highest probability of winning. A clan’s fertility is determined ex ante by each group. In the quest for greater bargaining power, each clan’s optimal size depends on that of the other clan, and a population race follows. This race may exhaust the natural resources and lead to the ultimate collapse of the society. In addition to well-known natural factors, the likelihood of a collapse turns out to be greater when the cost of war is low, the probability of succeeding in war is highly responsive to the number of fighters, and the marginal return to labor is high. We analyze whether these factors can account for the difference between Easter and Tikopia Islands. The paper also makes a methodological contribution in that it is the first fertility model to include strategic complementarities between groups’ fertility decisions.

Would empowering women initiate the demographic transition in least developed countries

We examine the pathways by which several dimensions of gender inequality affect fertility and growth in a model with nonunitary households. This approach allows for a corner regime with maximum fertility, the absence of women from the labor market, and gender inequality in education. Policies to ease countries out of the corner regime are promoting mothers’ survival and curbing infant mortality, while reducing the social and institutional gender gap (SIGG) is useless. In the interior regime, parents consider the impact of their childrens education on their future marital bargaining power, and reducing the SIGG lowers fertility and fosters growth.We examine the pathways by which gender inequality affects fertility and hampers growth. We introduce several dimensions of gender inequality into a 2-sex OLG model with a nonunitary representation of household decision-making. We characterize a Malthusian corner regime which is characterized by strong gender inequality in education and high fertility. We find both in theory and in the data that reducing the social and institutional gender gap does not help to escape from this regime while reducing the wage gender gap lowers fertility only in countries which have already escaped from it. The key policies to ease out the countries in the Malthusian regime are to promote mothers longevity and to curb infant mortality. In the interior regime, parents consider the impact of their children education on the expected intra-household bargaining position in their future couple. Education could thus compensate against the institutional and social gender gap that still exists in developed countries.

The dynamics of bequeathed tastes

If children inherit life standard aspirations from their parents, then their savings are affected and cycles may appear in overlapping generations (OLG) models with production. At some point of an expansion, aspirations grow faster than wages, savings decrease, and a contraction begins.