Social norms, fertility and economic development

This paper presents an overlapping generations model with endogenous fertil ity and human capital accumulation. Within such a framework, it shows how t he presence of family-size norms can lead to multiple equilibria. It can th us potentially explain different development patterns without recourse to i ncreasing returns and differences in initial conditions. Furthermore, it de rives sufficient conditions under which different equilibria can be Pareto ranked. Finally, it shows that the main results hold also in the case where there exists parental altruism. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.