Economics of Demography, Natural Resources and Environment - Einzelansicht

Instructors:     Prof. Dr. Matthias Kalkuhl and Dr. Thang Dao

Aggarwal, R. et al. (2001). Access to natural resources and the fertility decision of women: the case of South Africa. Environment and Development Economics 6: 209-236.

Biddlecom, A.E. et al. (2005). Environmental Effects on Family Size Preferences and Subsequent Reproductive Behavior in Nepal. Population and Environment 26: 183-206.

Brander, J. and M.S. Taylor (1998), “The Simple Economics of Easter Island: A Ricardo-Malthus Model of Renewable Resource Use”, American Economic Review 88(1): 119-138.

Bretschger, L. (2013). Population Growth and Natural-Resource Scarity: Long-run Development under Seemingly Unfavorable Conditions. Scandinavian Journal of Economics 115 (3), 722 – 755.

De la Croix, D. and A. Gosseries (2012). The natalist bias of pollution control. Journal of Environmental Economics and Management 63, 271 – 287.

Galor, O. and D.N. Weil (2000). Population, Technology, and Growth: From Malthusian Stagnation to the Demographic Transition and Beyond. American Economic Review 90 (4), 806 – 828.

Lanz B., S. Dietz, and T. Swanson (2017). Global Population Growth, Technology, and Malthusian constraints: A Quantitative Growth Theoretic Perspective. International Economic Review 58 (3), 973 – 1006. 

Nerlove, L. and L.K. Raut (1997). Growth Models with Endogenous Population – A General Framework. In Handbook of Population and Family Economics, M.R. Rosenzweig and O. Stark (Eds).

Peretto, P. and S. Valente (2015). Growth on a finite planet: resources, technology and population in the long run. Journal of Economic Growth 20, 305 – 331.

Advanced Microeconomics, Advanced Macroeconomics, Growth and Distribution

Portfolio (presentation and term paper)

This course focuses on the fundamental and advanced literature of the composite topic regarding to Demography, Natural Resources, and Environment. Demography in this course refers to the dynamics of population (fertility, mortality, household structure, etc.) in relation to the natural resource and environmental constraints.

The course covers the long economic history from Malthusian stagnation, through demographic transition, to the modern growth regime, and also the current exogenous environmental shocks on population, household structure, and time allocation within households. It will address the mainstream theories of endogenous population in several economic growth models, beside the recent empirical literature and policy relevance of this topic.

This course provides graduate students a solid background of the dynamic interactions between Population, Natural Resources and Environment. Through this course, the students should be able to understand

• Solow-Swan model with exogenous and endogenous population growth.
• Niehans model
• Malthusian model
• Quality-Quantity tradeoff with parental altruism: The Backer-Lewis model
• the Unified Growth model
• other (advanced) Theoretical and Quantitative models with Technological Change.

This course also aims at facilitating the students to understand research papers with independently critical minds through

• skills in reading research papers
• presenting papers in class
• discussing the papers
• possibly doing simulations based on qualitative results from the papers.