A breadwinner's demand for life insurance depends on the demographic structure of his or her household. The author captures the relationship by extending Menahem E. Yaari's life insurance framework to include the preferences of all household members explicitly. In many households, the insured is the husband and the beneficiaries are his wife and offspring. Their demand for insurance of the husband's life is derived from a life cycle model in which income is uncertain. The results are intuitively appealing in that they describe the explicit calculation made by purchasers of life insurance. Empirical estimates based on observed life insurance ownership also are encouraging.

A long tradition in the development literature has been to associate the aggregate savings rate with the dependency ratio, the ratio of dependent children to adults. In this paper I formalize the relationship by developing a life-cycle model in which offspring are assets from the viewpoint of their parents. The model is used to help explain the increase in nineteenth-century U.S. savings rates. I find that between 1830 and 1900 about one-quarter of the 6-percentage-point rise in the savings rate can be attributed to a decline in the dependency rate.

This paper investigates the economics of the transition of land from rural to urban use. A simple model is employed to examine the developer's problem: When and at what destiny should vacant land be developed to maximize the present value of the Land? A series of rules emerges from the analysis to the timing and density of new development. In the latter half of the paper, the rules are tested against recent Canadian experience and peform well.