Live Longer, Learn More: A Lesson from Nineteenth-Century Armenia

Èric Roca Fernández (), Sinara Gharibyan and David Gomtsyan ()
Additional contact information
Èric Roca Fernández: CERDI - Centre d'Études et de Recherches sur le Développement International - IRD - Institut de Recherche pour le Développement - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - UCA - Université Clermont Auvergne
Sinara Gharibyan: IOS - Ost- und Südosteuropa verstehen
David Gomtsyan: CREI - Centre de Recerca en Economia Internacional - UPF - Universitat Pompeu Fabra [Barcelona]

Post-Print from HAL

Abstract: What makes economic development sustainable? One of the best ways to secure lasting growth is educating the population. When families invest more in their children's education, those children go on to have better chances of working, producing, innovating and passing those skills on in turn. In earlier societies, though, resources were limited, and families couldn't always invest as much as they might have wanted in each child. So, they faced a simple trade-off: more children, or fewer children with more resources for each. For a long time, quantity was chosen. But as economic development progressed, couples in many societies began having fewer children and investing more in each one. The question is straightforward: what leads a family to choose fewer, better-educated children? In a paper on nineteenth-century Armenia, Sinara Gharibyan, David Gomtsyan, and E. Roca Fernández explore one answer: mortality. The logic is intuitive: when children are more likely to survive, and adults can expect to live longer, education becomes a better investment, since the effort put in today has more time to pay off.

Keywords: Human capital formation; Mortality; Disease environment; Geography; Armenia (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-07-15
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Published in 2026

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

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

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:hal-05693415

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Post-Print from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().