%0 Report
        %A Bell, Clive
%A Gersbach, Hans
%A Komarov, Evgenij
        %T Untimely Destruction: Pestilence, War and Accumulation in the Long Run
        %D 2019
        %8 2019 Oct
        %I Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)
        %C Bonn
        %7 IZA Discussion Paper
        %N 12680
        %U https://www.iza.org/index.php/publications/dp12680
        %X This paper analyses the effects of disease and war on the accumulation of human and physical capital. We employ an overlapping-generations frame-work in which young adults, confronted with such hazards and motivated by old-age provision and altruism, make decisions about investments in schooling and reproducible capital. A poverty trap exists for a wide range of stationary war losses and premature adult mortality. If parents are altruistic and their sub-utility function for own consumption is more concave than that for the children's human capital, the only possible steady-state growth path involves full education. Otherwise, steady-state paths with incompletely educated children may exist, some of them stationary ones. We also examine, analytically and with numerical examples, a growing economy's robustness in a stochastic environment. The initial boundary conditions have a strong influence on outcomes in response to a limited sequence of destructive shocks. 
        %K steady states
%K capital accumulation and destruction
%K premature mortality
%K poverty traps
%K overlapping generations