Conventional wisdom suggests that increased life expectancy had a key role in causing a rise in investment in human capital. I incorporate the retirement decision into a version of Ben-Porath's (1967) model and find that a necessary condition for this causal relationship to hold is that increased life expectancy will also increase lifetime labor supply. I then show that this condition does not hold for American men born between 1840 and 1970 and for the American population born between 1890 and 1970. The data suggest similar patterns in Western Europe. I end by discussing the implications of my findings for the debate on the fundamental causes of long-run growth.

We argue that one major cause of the U.S. post-war baby boom was the rise in female labour supply during World War II. We develop a quantitative dynamic general equilibrium model with endogenous fertility and female labour force participation decisions. We use the model to assess the impact of the war on female labour supply and fertility in the decades following the war. For the war generation of women, the high demand for female labour brought about by mobilization leads to an increase in labour supply that persists after the war. As a result, younger women who reach adulthood in the 1950s face increased labour market competition, which impels them to exit the labour market and start having children earlier. The effect is amplified by the rise in taxes necessary to pay down wartime government debt. In our calibrated model, the war generates a substantial baby boom followed by a baby bust.

In one of the greatest extensions of property rights in human history, common law countries began giving rights to married women in the 1850s. Before this “women's liberation,” the doctrine of coverture strongly incentivized parents of daughters to hold real estate, rather than financial assets such as money, stocks, or bonds. We exploit the staggered nature of coverture's demise across U.S. states to show that women's rights led to shifts in household portfolios, a positive shock to the supply of credit, and a reallocation of labor toward nonagriculture and capital‐intensive industries. Investor protection thus deepened financial markets, aiding industrialization.