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on Economic Growth |
| By: | Cemal Eren Arbath; Quamral H. Ashraf; Oded Galor; Marc Klemp |
| Abstract: | This research advances the hypothesis and establishes empirically that interpersonal population diversity has contributed significantly to the emergence, prevalence, recurrence, and severity of intrasocietal conflicts. Exploiting an exogenous source of variations in population diversity across nations and ethnic groups, it demonstrates that population diversity, as determined predominantly during the exodus of humans from Africa tens of thousands of years ago, has con- tributed significantly to the risk and intensity of historical and contemporary internal conflicts, accounting for the confounding effects of geographical, institutional, and cultural characteristics, as well as for the level of economic development. These findings arguably reflect the adverse effect of population diversity on interpersonal trust, its contribution to divergence in preferences for public goods and redistributive policies, and its impact on the degree of fractionalization and polarization across ethnic, linguistic, and religious groups. |
| Date: | 2018 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:bro:econwp:2018-6&r=gro |
| By: | Cilliers, Jeanne (Department of Economic History, Lund University); Mariotti, Martine (Research School of Economics, Australian National University) |
| Abstract: | Using South African Families (SAF), a new database of settler genealogies, we provide the first comprehensive analysis of women’s fertility in settler South Africa between 1700 and 1900. Differences in parity rates across geographic regions suggest couples knew how to limit fertility prior to the global onset of the first fertility transition. We date the start of South Africa’s fertility transition to cohorts born in the 1850s, having children from the 1870s. This timing is similar to other settler communities and earlier than many European countries despite somewhat different economic and social circumstances. |
| Keywords: | South Africa; Fertility; Genealogies; Settler demography |
| JEL: | J13 N01 N37 |
| Date: | 2018–03–09 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hhs:luekhi:0173&r=gro |
| By: | Victor Court (CERES-ERTI - Centre d'Enseignement et de Recherche sur l'Environnement et la Societé / Environmental Research and Teaching Institute - ENS Paris - École normale supérieure - Paris); Emmanuel Bovari (CES - Centre d'économie de la Sorbonne - UP1 - Université Panthéon-Sorbonne - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique) |
| Abstract: | This article provides a knowledge-based and energy-centered unified growth model of the economic transition from limited to sustained growth. In an overlapping generation framework, we introduce final energy as a production factor of a composite final good sector, along with human capital, a learning-by-doing technology, and a Schumpeterian technology. Final energy results from a CES aggregation of energy inputs that come from renewable (biomass, wind, water) and exhaustible (coal, oil, gas) primary resources. The production of those inputs also requires human capital along with specific learning-by-doing and Schumpeterian technologies. Furthermore, with an endogenous sequence of General Purpose Technologies (GPTs), we explicitly feature pure technological externalities that foster the efficiency of both learning-by-doing and R&D-based technological progress. This setting allows us to distinguish two economic regimes: (i) a pre-modern organic regime dominated by limited growth in per capita output, high fertility, low levels of human capital, technological progress generated by learning-by-doing, and rare GPT arrivals; and (ii) a modern fossil regime characterized by sustained growth of per capita output, low fertility, high levels of human capital, technological progress generated by profit-motivated R&D, and increasingly frequent GPT arrivals. Most importantly, these economic, technological and demographic regimes' changes are associated with an energy transition. This transition results from the endogenous shortage of renewable resources availability and the arrival of new GPTs, which redirect technological progress towards the exploitation of previously unprofitable exhaustible energy carriers. Calibrations of the model are currently in progress and will allow a simulation of the historical experience of England for the period 1560-2010. In a second step, we plan to reiterate these simulations to compare the different trajectories of Western Europe and Eastern Asia. |
| Keywords: | Unified Growth Theory,Useful Knowledge,Energy Transition,Demography |
| Date: | 2018–01–31 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hal:cesptp:hal-01698755&r=gro |
| By: | Claude Diebolt (BETA, University of Strasbourg Strasbourg, France); Charlotte Le Chapelain (Centre Lyonnais des Historiens du Droit et de la Pensée Politique, Bureau d’Economie Théorique et Appliquée, Université de Lyon 3); Audrey Rose Menard (Laboratoire d’Economie et de Management Nord-Atlantique) |
| Date: | 2018 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:afc:wpaper:02-18&r=gro |
| By: | Raffaella Coppier; Fabio Sabatini; Mauro Sodini |
| Abstract: | We develop an overlapping generations model to study how the interplay between social and human capital affects fertility. In a frame- work where families face a trade-off between the quantity and quality of children, we incorporate the assumption that social capital plays a key role in the accumulation of human capital. We show how the erosion of social capital can trigger a chain of reactions leading households to base their childbearing decisions on quantity, instead of quality, resulting in higher fertility. |
| Keywords: | Fertility, quantity-quality trade-off, human capital, education, social capital, trust. |
| JEL: | J13 Z1 Z13 |
| Date: | 2018–03–04 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:eei:rpaper:eeri_rp_2018_04&r=gro |