Related papers: Low Total Fertility in Simple Economic Systems
Reproductive success and survival are influenced by wealth in human populations. Wealth is transmitted to offsprings and strategies of transmission vary over time and among populations, the main variation being how equally wealth is…
The prevalence of sexual reproduction ("sex") in eukaryotes is an enigma of evolutionary biology. Sex increases genetic variation only tells its long-term superiority in essence. The accumulation of harmful mutations causes an immediate and…
Many interventions in global health save lives. One criticism sometimes lobbed at these interventions invokes the spirit of Malthus. The good done, the charge goes, is offset by the harm of spreading the earth's limited resources more…
Environmental stochasticity is known to be a destabilizing factor, increasing abundance fluctuations and extinction rates of populations. However, the stability of a community may benefit from the differential response of species to…
The growth of a population divided among spatial sites, with migration between the sites, is sometimes modelled by a product of random matrices, with each diagonal elements representing the growth rate in a given time period, and…
Is a causal description of human wealth history conceivable? To investigate the matter we introduce a simple causal albeit strongly aggregated model, assuming that the observed wealth growth is mainly driven by human collaborative efforts…
We investigate the dynamics of wealth inequality in an economy where households have positional preferences, with the strength of the positional concern determined endogenously by inequality of wealth distribution in the society. We…
Estimating the causal effect of fertility on women's employment is challenging because fertility and labor decisions are jointly determined. The difficulty is amplified in low- and middle-income countries, where longitudinal data are…
Models of population growth and extinction are an increasingly popular subject of study. However, consequences of stochasticity and noise in shaping distributions and outcomes are not sufficiently explored. Here we consider a distributed…
The Anthropocene is characterized by close interdependencies between the natural Earth system and the human society, posing novel challenges to model development. Here we present a conceptual model describing the long-term coevolution of…
A phenomenon that strongly influences the demography of small introduced populations and thereby potentially their genetic diversity is the Allee effect, a reduction in population growth rates at small population sizes. We take a stochastic…
The dynamics of adaptation is difficult to predict because it is highly stochastic even in large populations. The uncertainty emerges from number fluctuations, called genetic drift, arising in the small number of particularly fit…
The concept of fitness as a measure for a species's success in natural selection is central to the theory of evolution. We here investigate how reproduction rates which are not constant but vary in response to environmental fluctuations,…
Stochastic multiplicative dynamics characterize many complex natural phenomena such as selection and mutation in evolving populations, and the generation and distribution of wealth within social systems. Population heterogeneity in…
Several theoretical frameworks have been proposed to explain observed biodiversity patterns, ranging from the classical niche-based theories, mainly employing a continuous formalism, to neutral theories, based on statistical mechanics of…
In biology and ecology, individuals or communities of individuals living in unpredictable environments often alternate between different evolutionary strategies to spread and reduce risks. Such behavior is commonly referred to as…
This paper utilizes wealth shocks from winning lottery prizes to examine the causal effect of financial resources on fertility. We employ extensive panels of administrative data encompassing over 0.4 million lottery winners in Taiwan and…
I study a population model in which the reproduction rate lambda is inherited with mutation, favoring fast reproducers in the short term, but conflicting with a process that eliminates agglomerations of individuals. The model is a variant…
This paper investigates the optimal harvesting strategy for a single species living in random environments whose growth is given by a regime-switching diffusion. Harvesting acts as a (stochastic) control on the size of the population. The…
The minimum-effort coordination game, having potentially important implications in both evolutionary biology and sociology, draws recently more attention for the fact that human behavior in this social dilemma is often inconsistent with the…