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David de la Croix (; born 22 April 1964) is a Belgian scientist and author in the field of economic growth and demographic economics. He is professor at the Université catholique de Louvain. == Contributions == David de la Croix and his co-authors R. Boucekkine and O. Licandro developed a unified framework encompassing longevity, education and economic growth.〔Boucekkine R., D. De la Croix and O. Licandro, Vintage human capital, demographic trends and growth, Journal of Economic Theory, 104, 340-375,2002〕 The basic link is that a longer life expectancy justifies a greater investment in education (this is called the Ben Porath mechanism in the related literature), which in turn fosters economic growth by promoting human capital accumulation. The resulting model has been taken to several sets of demographic data pertaining to the 17th and 18th centuries, providing evidence on the role of demographics in the Industrial Revolution. This conclusion is reinforced by the work with Omar Licandro on famous people, which provides a broad picture of the evolution of the longevity of the elite over the last centuries, using a database of hundreds of thousands of famous people (nobles, artists, scientists etc.).〔de la Croix D. and O. Licandro, The longevity of famous people from Hammurabi to Einstein, ''Journal of Economic Growth'', 20, 263–303, 2015〕 In a similar vein, de la Croix and his co-author M. Doepke contributed to the development of a unified framework encompassing fertility, education, inequality and growth. Here, the link involves economic inequality: wealth and education entail lower fertility and more spending on education, thereby deepening inequality; but an increase in inequality lowers average education, hence growth; taking the model to data reveals that differential fertility accounts for most of the empirical relationship between inequality and growth: it implies that neglecting fertility behavior in analyzing the growth-inequality nexus can be strongly misleading.〔de la Croix D. and M. Doepke, Inequality and growth: why differential fertility matters, American Economic Review, 93, 1091-1113, 2003〕 The kind of work mentioned here has implications for policy decisions, definitely with respect to development, but also with respect to education, pensions or migration in developed countries. Some of these implications have been formulated in policy briefs accessible to the general public and politicians. Further work by de la Croix includes a study of childlessness, where, together with Thomas Baudin and Paula Gobbi, he lists a series of causes of childlessness (natural, social, voluntary) and proposes a methodology to identify their respective importance based on a structural model. Policy implications of this theory are non negligible, in particular when considering that avoidable involuntary childlessness reduces the capability set of poor people. With Fabio Mariani, de la Croix is interested in understanding the economic determinants of changes in marriage laws in the very long run. Changes in income level and in its distribution are key to understand the switch from polygyny to strict monogamy that happened during the Urban Revolution in Europe. Later on, from the 19th century onward, he rise of income per person triggered the vote of "Serial monogamy" laws, allowing for divorce an remarriage. A generalization of this theory for the rest of the world is still needed. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「David de la Croix」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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