An Estimable Dynamic Stochastic Model of Fertility and Child Mortality

A stochastic model of mortality, fertility, and human capital investment

This paper examines the relationship between fertility and human capital investment and its implications for economic growth, focusing on the effects of declining mortality. Unlike the existing literature, this paper stresses the role of uncertainty about the number of surviving children. If the marginal utility of a surviving child is convex, then there will be a precautionary demand for child...

Wolpin’s Model of Fertility Responses to Infant/Child Mortality

Suppose that births are biological feasible in the first two periods of a family’s life cycle, but that the woman is infertile in the third period. Each offspring may die in either of the first two periods of life, as an “infant” or as a “child”, with probabilities given by p1 (infant mortality) and p2 (child mortality). Within periods, deaths occur subsequent to to decisions about births. Thus...

Issues in the Development of an Estimable Dynamic

Evaluating Early Childhood Policies: An Estimable Model of Family Child Investments

There is extensive evidence showing that skills developed early in life have important consequences for adult life outcomes. Such findings have motivated a large literature analyzing the production of skills in young children. However, little is known about how families make decisions about investments in their children. In this paper, I estimate a production function of skills in young childre...

An Estimable Dynamic General Equilibrium Model of Work, Schooling and Occupational Choice

This paper develops and estimates a dynamic general equilibrium overlapping generations model of career decisions. The model is fit to data on life cycle employment, schooling and occupation decisions, and on life cycle labor earnings, within and between cohorts observed in the US between 1968 and 1993. Based on the estimates of the model, the impact of cohort size on skill prices and, conseque...