Overview
Michele Boldrin is an Italian-American economist and professor at Washington University in St. Louis. His research spans economic growth, innovation and intellectual property economics, and demographic economics. He is best known in fertility research for the Boldrin-Jones model of reverse altruism, in which children serve as retirement assets and public pension systems substitute for private old-age investment by children — providing a quantitative explanation for the post-WWII fertility decline and the Europe–US total fertility rate (TFR) gap.
Key Contributions
- Boldrin-Jones fertility model (with Larry E. Jones): Developed the reverse-altruism framework in which parents have children because children provide old-age support, in contrast to the Barro-Becker dynasty model. In general equilibrium (GE), Social Security (SS) expansion reduces fertility by substituting for the retirement-income role of children. Co-authored the model's quantitative application in Boldrin, De Nardi, and Jones (2015), which calibrates the model to account for 55–65% of the Europe–US TFR gap and over 80% of cross-country TFR variation. See Boldrin De Nardi and Jones 2015 — Fertility and Social Security.
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