The Industrial Revolution and the Demographic Transition are the two great forces that explain the upward march of modern incomes. This paper sets out the empirical realities attempts to unify these events through theories of human capital investment have to meet. The major difficulty is to form an explanation which connects them which can also reconcile the seeming differences in fertility behavior over time and in cross section in the pre-industrial world, the transition period, and the modern world. (JEL: J1, N3, O4)
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Gregory Clark (2005) studied this question.
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