David de la Croix

David de la Croix (born 1964, PhD 1992) is Professor of Economics at UCLouvain (Belgium) and research fellow at CEPR. He has taught on a visiting basis at UCLA, Copenhagen, Aix-Marseille, Nanterre, Capetown, São Paulo, Taipei, Rostock, NYU Abu Dhabi and Poznań. He is the instigator and editor-in-chief of the Journal of Demographic Economics, published by Cambridge University Press, and was associate editor for the Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, the Journal of Development Economics, and the Journal of Public Economic Theory. David de la Croix studies the nexus between human capital and long-run economic growth. He has developed general equilibrium frameworks that highlight how mechanisms and incentives contribute to higher productivity and the accumulation of knowledge. He’s had a particular focus on how longevity changes incentives to educate, the effect of the interaction between education and fertility on growth, how family types shape human capital accumulation, and how knowledge institutions affect economic progress. David’s specific approach is to develop quantitative theory to measure the importance of these mechanisms in explaining key features of the data. Recently he led a project (ERC Advanced Grant) on European universities and academies, combining an large scale data collection exercise with a variety of quantitative approaches to investigate how the features of European academia helped the West to take-off.