Population Economics

From Malthus to Becker, the economic approach to population growth and its interactions with the surrounding economic environment has undergone a major transformation. Population Economics elucidates the theory behind this shift and the consequences for economic policy.

From Malthus to Becker, the economic approach to population growth and its interactions with the surrounding economic environment has undergone a major transformation. Population Economics elucidates the theory behind this shift and the consequences for economic policy. Razin and Sadka systematically examine the microeconomic implications of people's decisions about how many children to have and how to provide for them on population trends and social issues of population policy. The authors analyze how these decisions affect labor supply, consumption, savings and bequests, investments in human capital, and economic growth, along with related new issues such as migration and income redistribution across generations, in an integrated microeconomic framework. Population Economics is a thoroughly modern treatment of population economics as a field in public economics. It integrates and extends Marc Nerlove's Household and Economy: Welfare Economics of Endogenous Fertility, as well as work written jointly with colleagues that has appeared in various journals and other publications.

Assaf Razin is a former Professor at Cornell University, Emeritus Professor at the Eitan Berglas School of Economics at Tel Aviv University, and Research Fellow at the NBER, CEPR, and CESifo. He is the author of Understanding Global Crises: An Emerging Paradigm and a coauthor of, among other books, The Decline of the Welfare State: Demography and Globalization and Migration and the Welfare State: Political-Economy Policy Formation, all published by the MIT Press. He is the recipient of the 2017 EMET Prize in Economics.

Efraim Sadka is Henry Kaufman Professor of International Capital Markets at Tel Aviv University.