In every developed country, the economic transition from pre-industrial stagnation to modem growth was accompanied by a demographic transition from high to low fertility. Even though the overall pattern is repeated, there are large cross-country variations in the timing and speed of the demographic transition. What accounts for falling fertility during the transition to growth? To answer this question, this paper develops a unified growth model that delivers a transition from stagnation to growth, accompanied by declining fertility. The model is used to determine whether government policies that affect the opportunity cost of education can account for cross-country variations in fertility decline. Among the policies considered, education subsidies are found to have only minor effects, while accounting for child labor regulation is crucial. Apart from influencing fertility, the policies also determine the evolution of the income distribution in the course of development.

This paper follows the process of financial distress from its onset to its resolution for a sample of 95 firms. Only about one-third of the firms survive as independent companies. A firm's short-run and long-run survival probability is positively affected by its operating performance, but its size, leverage, and debt structure complexity have no effect on its survival chances. The post-distress operating performance of the surviving firms is very close to the industry median. Filing for Chapter 11 reduces a firm's survival chances but prolongs financial distress. Overall, the evidence suggests that the U.S. financial distress environment leads to an important extent to the survival of the fittest. Chapter 11 may buy poorly performing firms some additional time, but it does not seem to allow many of them to ultimately escape the discipline of the market for corporate control.

The first part of this essay explores some of the reasons why Neapolitan humanism continued to have a difficult standing throughout the twentieth century, and how scholars of the Neapolitan Renaissance sought to overcome these difficulties. The principal argument will be that modern scholars have circumscribed the character of Neapolitan humanism mainly by adopting paradigms developed in the context of Northern Italian, and especially Florentine humanism. In the second part, a different approach is endorsed. As is argued, the intellectual outlook of Neapolitan humanism was molded rather by conflicts among the humanists than by a stance common to all of them. Therefore, the main question is not the Neapolitan “brand” of humanism, but the role of Neapolitan humanists within the humanist movement as a whole. This point is illustrated by sketches of some of the controversies involving the first generation of humanists at court, namely Antonio Beccadelli, known as Panormita, Bartolomeo Facio, and Lorenzo Valla. Their struggles heavily influenced the intellectual outlook and philosophical style of Giovanni Pontano, the key figure of Neapolitan humanism in the second half of the fifteenth century.

I compare the predictions of three variants of the altruistic-parent model by Barro and Becker for the relationship between child mortality and fertility. In the baseline model, fertility choice is continuous, and there is no uncertainty over the number of surviving children. The baseline model is contrasted to an extension with discrete fertility choice and stochastic mortality, and a setup with sequential fertility choice. The quantitative predictions of themodels are remarkably similar. While in each model the total fertility rate falls as child mortality declines, the number of surviving children increases. The results suggest that factors other than declining infant and child mortality are responsible for the large decline in net reproduction rates observed in industrialized countries over the last century.