作者
Izabella Kuncz, Éva Berde
发表日期
2016/7/4
来源
EcoMod2016
期号
9590
出版商
EcoMod
简介
The "Beckerian" theory of the quantity-quality tradeoff between the number of children and their quality is deeply permeates all the literature dealing with fertility rate analysis. It has great influence to the new direction of growth models, which derives the growth opportunities from the number and "quality" of the population growth (or decrease). In these models human capital investments play crucial role (see Lee and Mason (2010) 1 ). In our paper we argue that Lee and Mason (2010) could not lead to a precise interpretation because they deal only with average data. We show that by calculating the correlation between the human investment and fertility rate using a continuous relationship between the two variables, a modified result is obtained. In the first part of our paper we build an overlapping generation (OLG) model, similar to that in Lee and Mason (2010), but with altered human capital elasticity. Additionally we include two other modifications: i) four overlapping generations instead of three are introduced, and ii) transfer to oldest generation is provided by the second and the third generations. We seek answers to the following question: How much consumption is provided for the youngest andthe oldest generations as a function of the fertility and survival rates? The different paths of our model show that there are difficulties if the fertility rate is extremely high or extremely low. In both cases elderly could improve their own situation if they work and receive labourincome. Children can consume at a proper level only if the fertility rate is not remarkably high. One way to decide the relevance of quantity – quality choice is to find out the relationship …