Emerging Development
Fertility Has Been Framed: Why Family Planning Is Not a Silver Bullet for Sustainable Development
Leigh Senderowicz & Taryn Valley
Studies in Comparative International Development, December 2025, Pages 724-755
Abstract:
High fertility and population growth have been framed as villains in global health and development. Inspired by neo-Malthusian concerns around resource depletion, scholars have argued that fertility reduction through increased contraceptive use is necessary to protect maternal health, prevent environmental disaster, and promote economic prosperity throughout the Global South. Despite substantial critique from feminist and anticolonial scholars, the scientific evidence behind these arguments has often been treated as established fact. This ostensible scientific consensus on the instrumental benefits of contraceptive use has been marshalled by the global family planning establishment in the wake of the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development to justify continued efforts to maximize contraceptive uptake in the Global South. Here, we critically examine the evidence linking high fertility to adverse maternal health, environmental, and economic outcomes and evaluate whether reducing fertility through increased contraceptive use offers an effective strategy to address these challenges. We find the state of the evidence weaker and more conflicted than commonly acknowledged, with many claims relying on small effect sizes and/or unjustified assumptions. While increasing contraceptive uptake and reducing fertility may offer limited, marginal advantages, we argue that family planning cannot effectively address the multidimensional challenges of global poverty, ill health, and environmental degradation. Instead, global health and development should address root causes of these phenomena, while family planning programs must radically refocus on reproductive autonomy.
The Effect of Immigration Enforcement Abroad on Immigrants' Home-Country Firms
Daniel Osuna Gomez & Eduardo Medina Cortina
Journal of Political Economy Microeconomics, forthcoming
Abstract:
We use the largest deportation program in modern US history to investigate the effect of deportation shocks on establishments in the migrants’ communities of origin. We link these deportations to Mexican municipalities by using transnational data on the undocumented migrant network and then merge them with rich establishment panel data, which includes formal and informal firms. Establishments in regions experiencing larger deportation shocks tend to increase in size, revenue, and exports. We provide evidence to suggest that these changes are driven by increases in consumer demand, the transference of human and financial capital, and reductions in workers' wages.
Education Competition and Fertility Intention: Evidence from China’s Private Tutoring Ban
Juanjuan Meng et al.
Economic Journal, forthcoming
Abstract:
Low fertility presents a major challenge for many nations. We study whether restricting competition-driven private tutoring can enhance fertility intentions by analysing China’s 2021 private tutoring ban. Using nationwide surveys, we elicit respondents’ fertility intentions under scenarios with and without the policy. The tutoring ban significantly increases expected total fertility by 7–8%, with larger effects in cities under greater policy intensity. Decomposition reveals that the primary driver is perceived reduction in educational competition, followed by improved parental health, parent-child relationships, and reduced time and monetary costs. We also find consistent results on actual birth rates three years after the policy.
Peace Dividends: Criminal Governance, Rational Violence, and Economic Development
Bruno Pantaleão
American Political Science Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
In this article, I show that in contexts where the state fails to deliver order and security, criminal organizations can paradoxically facilitate economic development. I consider the case of the Primeiro Comando da Capital [“First Capital Command”] (PCC) -- a Brazilian prison gang that has achieved hegemony over the criminal market of a large region and become the de facto regulator of violence and organized crime in São Paulo. Employing a robust difference-in-differences approach on granular administrative employment data, firm creation registries, and satellite-based nighttime luminosity (as a proxy for informal economic activity), I provide causal evidence that the PCC’s stable, rule-based criminal governance significantly increased local economic opportunities. My findings challenge conventional wisdom on the negative economic externalities of crime, demonstrating that hegemonic, institutionalized, and non-extractive criminal governance can generate positive economic externalities by reducing violence and uncertainty.
The Consumer Revolution Comes Home: Material Inequalities in London’s Eighteenth-Century Polite Society
Bruno Blondé, Bas Spliet & Jon Stobart
Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Autumn 2025, Pages 123-155
Abstract:
Urban spaces are often considered nurseries of consumer developments. Focusing on eighteenth-century London, the cradle of the famed nascent consumer society, we employ newspaper advertisements of forthcoming auction sales to map changes in the domestic material culture of the city’s “polite society.” Over the course of the century, British-made products replaced Asian luxuries among the most distinct positional goods promoted in these advertisements, and new social distinctions emerged around objects related to leisure, gardening, music, and domestic sociability and conviviality. Overall, however, narrowing consumer inequalities outweighed these renewed differentiations in the social distribution of positional goods, suggesting a convergence of domestic material culture between London’s elite and upper middling sorts.
Goldilocks: American Precious Metals and the Rise of the West
Yao Chen, Nuno Palma & Felix Ward
Review of Income and Wealth, February 2026
Abstract:
We estimate the contribution of the American precious metal windfall to Western Europe's growth performance in the early modern period. The exogenous nature of American precious metal extraction allows for the identification of monetary effects. We find that American precious metals fostered Western Europe's growth by stimulating trade and capital accumulation. Our findings place Western Europe's second-stage receivers in a particularly fortunate goldilocks zone that enjoyed monetary stimulus, while being insulated against the transport-loss induced financial crises that caused persistent damage to first-stage receiver Spain.
Volatile Rates, Fragile Growth: Global Financial Risk and Productivity Dynamics
Nils Gornemann, Eugenio Rojas & Felipe Saffie
NBER Working Paper, December 2025
Abstract:
We document that rising volatility in U.S. interest rates, a key dimension of global financial risk, notably depresses the trend of economic activity in emerging market economies (EMEs) but not in advanced economies (AEs). Using a panel state-space model, we show that a one standard- deviation shock to U.S. monetary policy uncertainty permanently lowers the level of GDP in EMEs by about 25 basis points after three years, with negligible effects in AEs. We rationalize this fact in a small open economy model where firms borrow against future profits to finance innovation. Higher volatility compresses firm values, tightens collateral constraints, and endogenously slows productivity growth, especially when financial frictions are severe.
Education and market liberal preferences
John Nye et al.
Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, January 2026
Abstract:
Nowadays very little attention has been paid to the worldwide and cross-generation stability of the relationship between education and pro-market preferences. More importantly, does economic development condition the effect of education on pro-market views? Using data from international surveys (WVS, LITS, ESS, ISSP), the Russian national longitudinal survey (RLMS-HSE) and the Russian survey of Trajectories in Education and Careers (TREC), we show that there is a robust positive relationship between education and free market views in most developed and developing countries. Notably, in the former Soviet Union, the link between more education and greater support for liberal market values holds for both the post-Soviet educated young and the old, who presumably received their education under the Soviet Union. Thus, education is not only correlated with higher support for liberal market values worldwide but, even in the case of the USSR with its anti-market educational content, a change in required years of schooling saw an increase in pro-market sentiment among those people affected.
Gender-Biased Technological Change: Milking Machines and the Exodus of Women from Farming
Philipp Ager, Marc Goñi & Kjell Salvanes
American Economic Review, January 2026, Pages 246-286
Abstract:
This paper studies how gender-biased technological change in agriculture affected women's work in twentieth-century Norway. In the 1950s, dairy farms began widely adopting milking machines to replace milking cows by hand, a task typically performed by young women. We show that the machines pushed rural young women in dairy-intensive areas out of farming. The displaced women moved to cities where they acquired more education and found better-paying, skilled employment. Our results suggest that the adoption of milking machines broke up allocative inefficiencies associated with moving costs across sectors, which improved the economic status of women relative to men.
Scarring and Selection in the Great Irish Famine
Matthias Blum, Christopher Colvin & Eoin McLaughlin
Economic History Review, February 2026, Pages 189-220
Abstract:
How do famines shape the health of survivors? We examine the long-term impact of the Great Irish Famine (1845–52) on human stature, distinguishing between adverse scarring effects and the apparent resilience of survivors due to selection. Using anthropometric data from more than 14500 individuals born before, during, and after this famine, we find that selection effects were most pronounced in areas with the highest mortality rates. Individuals born in severely affected regions exhibited no evidence of stunted growth, indicating that the Famine disproportionately eliminated the most vulnerable. In contrast, stunting is observed only in areas with lower excess mortality, where selective pressures were weaker. These findings contribute to debates on the biological consequences of extreme catastrophic risks, demonstrating how selection effects can obscure long-term health deterioration. More broadly, our study provides a methodological framework for assessing selection in historical anthropometric research.