The notion that the cost of increasing family size depends upon the level of expenditures or investment per child (child quality), formalized in Becker and Lewis (1973) and Willis (1973), provides a rationale for the contemporaneous inter-country negative correlation between the schooling attainment of young persons and birth rates as well as the trends in these variables over time in developed countries during their demographic transition.A sufficient condition for fertility to fall and, say, schooling to rise as development proceeds in this framework is that the shadow-price constant income effect on quality per child 1 exceed that on numbers of children.Such an explanation, however, would appear :..o be of little value for those who hold that population growth itself impedes economic development (e.g., Coale and Hoover (1958)).From this perspective, the compensated substitution.implications of the theory are of concern, whereby price interventions which impinge on family size decisions can be used to accelerate pe~-capita income.The chief focus of policies aimed at reducing fertility in the absence of income growth appears to be on altering the "own" price of children through lowering information costs associated with contraceptive methdos in order to take advantage of recent innovations in birth control technolo~y.In this paper, we examine both theoretically and empirically the natalist impact of two alternative potential policies--reductions in the price of schooling and tech~ological innovation in the agricltural context--based on a rural household model in which (school) investments per child influence the cost of children as in the Becker-Lewis framework and in which the returns to schooling rise in a dynamic environment as a consequence of the allocative effect of education (Welch, 1970;Schultz, 1975).I show that, as a consequence of the "quantity-quality" interaction, reductions in the direct costs of schooling may raise fertility levels even if child schooling and the quantity of children are substitutes as conventionally defined and even if (observed) income effects are not positive.2,:. w

Few attempts have been made to test empirically the multitude of models formulated to describe household labor supply behavior in the context of rural labor markets in developing countries. In this paper refutable predictions are derived from a neoclassical multi-person household model based on competitive assumptions modified to take into account differences in landholding status. A national sample survey of rural households from India is used to estimate the parameters of the model for male and female agricultural workers from farm and nonfarm households. The estimates generally conform to the implications of the neoclassical-competitive framework.

Household-level panel data from a nationally representative sample of rural Indian households describing the adoption and profitability of high-yielding seed varieties (HYVs) associated with the Green Revolution are used to test the implications of a model incorporating learning by doing and learning spillovers. The estimates indicate that (i) imperfect knowledge about the management of the new seeds was a significant barrier to adoption; (ii) this barrier diminished as farmer experience with the new technologies increased; (iii) own experience and neighbors' experience with HYVs significantly increased HYV profitability; and (iv) farmers do not fully incorporate the village returns to learning in making adoption decisions.

In this paper we formulate and estimate a finite-horizon, structural dynamic model of agricultural investment behavior that incorporates the major features of low-income agricultural environments: income uncertainty, constraints on borrowing and rental markets, and the use of investment assets to generate income and smooth consumption. The model is fit to longitudinal Indian household data on farm profits, bullock stocks, and pump sets. The estimated structural parameters are used to assess the effects on the life cycle accumulation of bullocks, agricultural profits, and welfare associated with complete markets and bullock liquidity and with second-best policies that provide assured sources of income to farmers and weather insurance.

The implications of the economic theories of marriage and of household fertility behavior are tested in a framework in which educational investment, marital search, and marital matches are responsive to marriage-market conditions and the personal traits of individual agents, some of which are unobserved by the econometrician. Implications are also derived and tested for the effects of longevity, attractiveness, preferences, and labor- and marriage-market conditions on schooling, marriage age, and spouse choice. The empirical results indicate that inattention to heterogeneity and martial selection leads to a false rejection of the economic theory of marriage but to a false acceptance of the value-of-time fertility hypothesis.