Fertility, Education, and Market Failures

Sylvain Dessy () and Stephane Pallage

No 148, Cahiers de recherche CREFE / CREFE Working Papers from CREFE, Université du Québec à Montréal

Abstract: We show that coordination failures may be part of an explanation for the demographic differences between rich and poor countries and their differing attitudes towards the use of child labor. Our analysis is carried out within a two-period, general equilibrium model with endogenous fertility, parental investment in children's education and firms' tradeoff between traditional technologies and the adoption of skill-intensive, modern ones. The model exhibits multiple equilibria due to the lack of a coordination mechanism between parental decisions on the quantity and the quality of children and entrepreneurs' technology choices.

Keywords: Endogenous fertility; education; child labor; skill-biased technology; welfare; multiple equilibria; coordination (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I20 J13 O33 J20 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dge and nep-lab
Date: Written 2002-04
View list of references

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.unites.uqam.ca/eco/CREFE/cahiers/cah148.pdf Main text (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Cahiers de recherche CREFE / CREFE Working Papers from CREFE, Université du Québec à Montréal
Address: P.O. Box 8888, Downtown Station, Montreal (Canada) Quebec, H3C 3P8
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by Stéphane Pallage ().