David de la Croix

With Fabio Mariani, de la Croix is interested in understanding the economic determinants of changes in marriage laws in the very long run. Changes in income level and in its distribution are key to understand the switch from polygyny to strict monogamy that happened during the Urban Revolution in Europe. Later on, from the 19th century onward, he rise of income per person triggered the adoption of "Serial monogamy" laws, allowing for divorce and remarriage. A generalization of this theory for the rest of the world is still needed.

A constant theme in David de la Croix publications is the role played by institutions for economic growth and development. “Institutions” is a very general term, referring to human-made organizations, laws and practices such as religion and family structures, among others. A representative publication, in collaboration with Matthias Doepke and Joel Mokyr, appeared in 2018 in the Quarterly Journal of Economics and deals with the historical role of apprenticeship institutions. Based on qualitative evidence and a new theory of pre-industrial technological progress, the three authors show that apprenticeship institutions were crucial to the economic rise of the West. Different from family- or clan-based institutions that were prevalent in the rest of the World, apprenticeship (as framed by the guild systems in Medieval Europe) allowed new techniques and innovations to spread rapidly across the continent thanks to master-apprentice interactions, without being constrained by family lines.

David de la Croix and his co-authors Raouf Boucekkine and Omar Licandro developed a unified framework encompassing longevity, education and economic growth. The basic link is that a longer life expectancy justifies a greater investment in education (this is called the Ben Porath mechanism in the related literature), which in turn fosters economic growth by promoting human capital accumulation. The resulting model has been taken to several sets of demographic data pertaining to the 17th and 18th centuries, providing evidence on the role of demographics in the Industrial Revolution. This conclusion is reinforced by the work with Omar Licandro on famous people, which provides a broad picture of the evolution of the longevity of the elite over the last centuries, using a database of hundreds of thousands of famous people (nobles, artists, scientists etc.).

In 2012, his book on fertility, education, growth and sustainability studies the consequences for macroeconomic outcomes, such as income inequality and growth, of individual fertility choices.

In 2002, he published with Philippe Michel a treatise on overlapping generations models as a tool to study economic growth, dynamics and policy.

David de la Croix (French: [david də la kʁwa] ; born 22 April 1964) is a Belgian scholar and author in the field of economic growth and demographic economics. He is professor at the University of Louvain (UCLouvain).