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This paper challenges conventional wisdom by arguing that greater longevity may have contributed less than previously thought for the significant accumulation of human capital during the transition from stagnation to growth. This is because when parents make choices over the quantity and quality of their offspring, greater longevity positively affects not only the returns to quality but also the returns to quantity. The theory suggests that in contrast to longevity, improvements in health are more likely to generate quantityquality tradeoff. Finally, it shows the importance of controlling for fertility when empirically examining the impact of children’s health on their education.

This paper analyzes a model of economic growth that explains differences in economic structure across countries. It highlights the interplay between productivity, talents utilization and entrepreneurship incentives. The paper has two main results. First, it argues that, when measuring human capital, we ignore one dimension, which is "talents utilization". It is suggested then that, in development accounting, human capital is inaccurately measured. Second, it shows that the magnitude of talents utilization increases with the level of development. Thus, the paper suggests that talents utilization amplifies differences in productivity and contributes to the explanation of large observed international differences in per-capita income.

An expansion or contraction in a sector intensively using female labor must affect female labor force participation. We suggest that, whenever trade and international specialization expand sectors prone to employing females, female labor force participation actually drops, and vice versa. In general, when sectors prone to employing females expand, sectors tending towards male employment must contract. This contraction, in turn, induces male workers to migrate to the expanding sectors, which, in our specification, drives female workers out of formal employment. In this sense, a country that is exporting female labor content is, in fact, substituting male labor for female labor. Finally, we show that our mechanism also applies in a case of technological change that is biased towards female labor.