Endogenous Fertility Waves and the Dynamics of Utility in an Overlapping Generations Model (opens in new tab)

This paper investigates the conditions under which the Easterlin hypothesis holds within a neoclassical overlapping generations model with endogenous capital accumulation, wages, interest rates, and fertility. We develop a tractable analytical framework that maps economic transitions into utility space via a continuously differentiable first-order difference equation for cohort lifetime utilities. This reformulation allows for a transparent norm...