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ECONOMIC GROWTH AND EVOLUTION: PARENTAL PREFERENCE FOR QUALITY AND QUANTITY OF OFFSPRING

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 June 2013

Jason Collins ,
Boris Baer  and
Ernst Juerg Weber
Jason Collins*
Affiliation:
University of Western Australia
Boris Baer
Affiliation:
University of Western Australia
Ernst Juerg Weber
Affiliation:
University of Western Australia
*
Address correspondence to: Jason Collins, Economics (M251), Business School, The University of Western Australia, 35 Stirling Highway, Crawley, Perth, Western Australia 6009, Australia; e-mail: jason@jasoncollins.org.
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Abstract

This paper presents a quantitative analysis of the model developed by Galor and Moav [Galor, Oded and Omer Moav (2002) Natural selection and the origin of economic growth. Quarterly Journal of Economics 117(4), 1133–1191] in which agents vary genetically in their preference for quality and quantity of children. The simulation produces a pattern of income and population growth that resembles the period of Malthusian stagnation before the Industrial Revolution and the take-off into a modern growth era. We also investigate the stability of the modern growth era as an absorbing state of the model under the introduction of a strongly quantity-preferring genotype. We show that, given the absence of a scale effect of population in the model, the economy can regress to a Malthusian state under this change in the initial distribution of genotypes.

Keywords

EvolutionNatural SelectionGrowthEducationHuman Capital
Type
Articles
Information
Macroeconomic Dynamics , Volume 18 , Issue 8 , December 2014 , pp. 1773 - 1796
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

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