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Abstract
Advanced economies undergo three transitions during their development: 1. They transition
from a rural to an urban economy. 2. They transition from low income growth to high
income growth. 3. Their demographics transition from initially high fertility and mortality
rates to low modern levels. The timings of these transitions are correlated in the historical
development of most advanced economies. I unify complementary theories of the transitions
into a nonlinear model of endogenous long run economic and demographic change. The
model reproduces the timing and magnitude of the transitions. Because the model captures
the interactions between all three transitions, it is able to explain three additional empirical
patterns: a declining urban-rural wage gap, a declining rural-urban family size ratio, and
most surprisingly, that early urbanization slows development.