Faculty seminar with David de la Croix

David de la Croix - CV

Title: The Emergence of the Child Quantity-Quality Tradeoff - insights from early modern academics.

Abstract

Reflect on the escape from a stagnant or Malthusian system. If this transformation is

propelled by human capital, it should be spearheaded by individuals possessing elevated

human capital. To explore this hypothesis, we investigate the connection between family

size and human capital among academics in Northern Europe in the two centuries

leading up to the Industrial Revolution. We gauge scholars' human capital using a

novel approach based on their publications. We find that scholars with a high number

of publications shifted from having more siblings to having fewer than others during

the first half of the 18th century. This shift is consistent with an evolutionary growth

model in which the initial Malthusian constraint leads the high human capital families

to reproduce more, before being endogenously substituted by a Beckerian constraint

with a child quality-quantity tradeoff. Our results support an extension of the Galor

and Moav (2002)'s approach, in which the decline of Malthusian constraints is linked