What caused the baby boom? And can it be explained within the context of the secular decline in fertility that has occurred over the last 200 years? The hypothesis is that:(a) The secular decline in fertility is due to the relentless rise in real wages that increased the opportunity cost of having children;(b) The baby boom is explained by an atypical burst of technological progress in the household sector that occurred in the middle of the last century. This lowered the cost of having children.A model is developed in an attempt to account, quantitatively, for both the baby boom and bust.

Powerful currents have reshaped the structure of families over the last century. There has been (i) a dramatic drop in fertility and greater parental investment in children; (ii) a rise in married female labor-force participation; (iii) a decline in marriage and a rise in divorce; (iv) a higher degree of positive assortative mating; (v) more children living with a single mother; (vi) shifts in social norms governing premarital sex and married women's roles in the labor market. Macroeconomic models explaining these aggregate trends are surveyed. The relentless flow of technological progress and its role in shaping family life are stressed. KeywordsAssortative mating, baby boom, baby bust, family economics, female labor supply, fertility, household income inequality, household production, human capital, macroeconomics, marriage and divorce, quality-quantity tradeoff, premarital sex, quantitative theory, single mothers, social change, survey paper, technological progress, women's rights January 2017Abstract Powerful currents have reshaped the structure of families over the last century. There has been (i) a dramatic drop in fertility and greater parental investment in children; (ii) a rise in married female labor-force participation; (iii) a significant decline in marriage and a rise in divorce; (iv) a higher degree of positive assortative mating; (v) more children living with a single mother; (vi) shifts in social norms governing premarital sex and married women's roles in the workplace. Macroeconomic models explaining these aggregate trends are surveyed. The relentless flow of technological progress and its role in shaping family life are stressed.JEL codes: D58, E1, E13, J1, J2, J12, J13, J22, N30, O3, O11, O15.

Between 1978 and 2003 the Chinese economy experienced a remarkable 5.7 percent annual growth of GDP per labor. At the same time, there has been a noticeable transformation of the economy: the share of workers in agriculture decreased from over 70 percent to less than 50 percent. We distinguish three sectors: private agriculture and nonagriculture and public nonagriculture. A growth accounting exercise reveals that the main source of growth was TFP in the private nonagricultural sector. The reallocation of labor from agriculture to nonagriculture accounted for 1.9 percent out of the 5.7 percent growth in output per labor. The reallocation of labor from the public to the private sector also accounted for a significant part of growth in the 1996-2003 period. We calibrate a general equilibrium model where the driving forces are public investment and employment, as well as sectorial TFP derived from our growth accounting exercise. The model tracks the historical employment share of agriculture and the labor productivities of all three sectors quite well. are deeply appreciated. a quantitative, general equilibrium growth model to try to capture China's recent growth and structural transformation. We use this model to project the likely path of China's future growth, and the role the transfer of labor from agriculture to nonagriculture will play in this growth.Our model has three sectors, the agricultural sector, the nonagricultural private sector, and the nonagricultural public (government) sector. The agricultural and the nonagricultural private sectors are profit maximizing; but we leave the objective of the Chinese public sector unspecified; the public sector simply extracts labor and capital from the rest of the economy. China is nominally still a socialist economy. At the beginning of our period, 1978, the public sector produced nearly all of nonagricultural output. Even in 1990, public sector output was over 90 percent of nonagricultural output. Thus, for China, it is important to model the public sector explicitly.Technological progress is exogenous in all three sectors, but is highest in the nonagricultural private sector. We show in the analysis of our model that the expansion of the nonagricultural public sector-which occurred in China from the late-1970s to the mid-1990s-will draw labor out of agriculture. We also show that the more rapid technological progress in the private nonagriculture sector will draw labor out of agriculture. A rise in private nonagricultural productivity will tend to lower the relative price of nonagricultural goods, raising the demand for labor in private nonagriculture, at the expense of labor in agriculture. Using plausible parameter values, we simulate our model and find that the model tracks the historical employment share of agriculture, and the labor productivities of all three sector remarkably well. Thus, the two main driving forces for China's structural transformation-or the decline in the agricultural share of employment-are the expansion of the nonagricultural public sec...

An average person born in the United States in the second half of the 19th century completed 7 years of schooling and spent 58 hours a week working in the market. In contrast, an average person born at the end of the 20th century completed 14 years of schooling and spent 40 hours a week working. In the span of 100 years, completed years of schooling doubled and working hours decreased by 30%. What explains these trends? We consider a model of human capital and labor supply to quantitatively assess the contribution of exogenous variations in productivity (wage) and life expectancy in accounting for the secular trends in educational attainment and hours of work. We find that the observed increase in wages and life expectancy accounts for 80% of the increase in years of schooling and 88% of the reduction in hours of work. Rising wages alone account for 75% of the increase in schooling and almost all the decrease in hours in the model, whereas rising life expectancy alone accounts for 25% of the increase in schooling and almost none of the decrease in hours of work. In addition, we show that the mechanism emphasized in the model is consistent with other trends at a more disaggregate level such as the reduction in the racial gap in schooling and the decrease in the cross-sectional dispersion in hours. (JEL E1, I25, J11, O4)

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