Fertility Choice, Land, and the Malthusian Hypothesis

In a standard overlapping generations growth model, with a fixed amount of land and endogenous fertility, the competitive economy converges to a steady state with a zero population growth rate and consumption per capita. The Malthusian hypothesis is interpreted as a statement about the relationship between population growth and consumption per-capita, when production exhibits diminishing returns to labor and there is a fixed amount of land essential for production. Even when individuals care only about the number of their children and not about their children's welfare, the equilibrium is such that they eventually would choose to have only one child for each adult. Hence, if Malthus's positive check' on population is the result of the response of optimizing agents to competitively determined prices, Malthus's pessimistic conjecture is not necessarily true, even though his other assumptions hold. -from Authors