The household demand model fails to explain the sharp falls in birth rates over short stretches of time (c.f. Coale and Watkins). To overcome this issue we need to incorporate externalities, ideational approaches and institutional approaches into our model.

Macro-level externalities mean that the socially optimal number of children differs from the privately optimal number. The most fundamental macro-level externality is whether population growth is good for a population. Considering other macro-externalities, we turn to research conducted by Lee and Miller who try to quantify macro-externalities to childbearing, which include the public costs associated with education, healthcare and pensions, which would be negative. [...]

The household demand model follows the tradition of neoclassical economics with rational maximising agents. It was devised in the 1960s and 1970s with contributions from Becker, Willis and Easterlin. The model posits a couple as being rational agents who wish to maximise their utility function which incorporates pleasure from children (their role as a consumption good), subject to their income constraint which includes time and thus allows us to examine the opportunity cost of having children on time.

Factors making it difficult to model demography:

• Parents are both the demanders and suppliers of children, which makes it difficult to observe prices of child services.

Is population growth good or bad?

When exploring population we fundamentally need to know whether it is good or bad for economic growth and development. There are various reasons and models to believe that population growth does indeed promote growth, but many others which refute this and argue that high population inhibits growth. The Solow model is one such model which would imply that high population growth reduces economic growth, because if there are more people then we need to train them and provide them with capital which depletes the fixed level of investment spending. If we are spending more investment money on equipping workers with basic tools, then we have less money to invest in better tools which may enhance economic growth and permit the economy to emerge from a poverty trap; for example, by allowing it to move into the manufacturing sector, with higher incomes than the more basic agricultural industries. [...]

A paper of mine, The Effect of Casual Teaching on Student Satisfaction: Evidence from the UK, has recently been published in Education Economics.

The paper evaluates the relationship between the proportion of university teaching conducted by individuals on a casual contract (*) and student satisfaction. This is of interest for a number of reasons. Firstly, because students are often seen as consumers in the UK’s higher education sector and often have to pay large fees to attend university. We should therefore hope that such consumers are satisfied with their purchase (in economic terms), or in other words, that students are satisfied with their uni experience. [...]