Demographers emphasize decreased mortality and “economic development” as the main
contributors generating the demographic transition. Contrary to previous findings, we show
that simple dynastic models à la Barro–Becker can reproduce observed changes in fertility
in response to decreased mortality and increased productivity growth if the intertemporal
elasticity of substitution is low enough. We show that this is largely due to number and
welfare of children being substitutes in the utility of parents in this case. We find that with an …

… Here we give figures–like the one given in the main text for CBR in Section 5–for the
other measures of fertility we have discussed, CTFR and γN. They show a similar pattern
overall with the model capturing significant fractions of the overall changes seen in the data–about
half (see also Table 2). … Here, we show figures of the calculations for the history of US
fertility using the version of the model including physical capital discussed in Section 6.2.
We include only the calculations for σ = 3.0 and σ = 0.5. We find that the results are very …