Search Results
Working Paper
Creative Destruction and the Reallocation of Capital in Rural and Urban Areas
We test the implications of Schumpeter’s theory of creative destruction on food manufacturer births and deaths using a dynamic, unobserved effects count model with correlated random effects. We find evidence of a creative destruction process via the interaction of previous firm birth and death, which is correlated with higher rates of contemporaneous firm birth and death in a given location. Results support Marshall’s notion of “something is in the air,” as evidenced by the strong correlation between sources of unobserved heterogeneity in the birth and death processes. Consistent with ...
Journal Article
Interview: Melissa Kearney
Over the past two decades, University of Maryland economist Melissa Kearney has been researching economic inequality and mobility, poverty, and children's well-being. She was first drawn to such topics, she says, by her own family's experiences.
Working Paper
Monetary Policy and Birth Rates: The Effect of Mortgage Rate Pass-Through on Fertility
This paper examines whether monetary policy pass-through to mortgage interest rates affects household fertility decisions. Using administrative data on mortgages and births in the UK, our empirical strategy exploits variation in the timing of when families were eligible for a rate adjustment, coupled with the large reductions in the monetary policy rate that occurred during the Great Recession. We estimate that each 1 percentage point drop in the policy rate increased birth rates by 2 percent. In aggregate, this pass-through of accommodative monetary policy to mortgage rates was sufficiently ...
What Has Been Driving World Population Growth?
The world’s population more than doubled from 1960 to 2021 despite the birth rate falling. Declining death rates in lower-income countries drove the growth.
Declining Birth Rates and Global Population Change
Learn what the world population would be, and how it would be distributed across low- and high-income countries, if birth rates hadn’t declined for the past 60 years.
Working Paper
What's Behind Declining Birth Rates in the U.S.?
Using the National Survey of Family Growth, this paper explores reasons behind the falling birth rate in the United States. The analysis confirms that newer generations of women are less likely to have any children than generations that came before. Comparing outcomes among women at the same age, two sources for this decline are identified: (1) a dramatic decrease in the desire to have children, but only among the youngest generation in the sample (Gen Z) and (2) an increase in the medical difficulty of having children among all generations of women since the Boomer generation. Various ...