A Treatise on the Family. G. S. Becker. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1981. Gary Becker is one of the most famous and influential economists of the second half of the 20th century, a fervent contributor to and expounder of the University of Chicago free-market philosophy, and winner of the 1992 Nobel Prize in economics. Although any book with the word "treatise" in its title is clearly intended to have an impact, one coming from someone as brilliant and controversial as Becker certainly had such a lofty goal. It has received many article-length reviews in several disciplines (Ben-Porath, 1982; Bergmann, 1995; Foster, 1993; Hannan, 1982), which is one measure of its scholarly importance, and yet its impact is, I think, less than it may have initially appeared, especially for scholars with substantive interests in the family. This book is, its title notwithstanding, more about economics and the economic approach to behavior than about the family. In the first sentence of the preface, Becker writes "In this book, I develop an economic or rational choice approach to the family." Lest anyone accuse him of focusing on traditional (i.e., material) economics topics, such as family income, poverty, and labor supply, he immediately emphasizes that those topics are not his focus. "My intent is more ambitious: to analyze marriage, births, divorce, division of labor in households, prestige, and other non-material behavior with the tools and framework developed for material behavior." Indeed, the book includes chapters on many of these issues. One chapter examines the principles of the efficient division of labor in households, three analyze marriage and divorce, three analyze various child-related issues (fertility and intergenerational mobility), and others focus on broader family issues, such as intrafamily resource allocation. His analysis is not, he believes, constrained by time or place. His intention is "to present a comprehensive analysis that is applicable, at least in part, to families in the past as well as the present, in primitive as well as modern societies, and in Eastern as well as Western cultures." His tone is profoundly conservative and utterly skeptical of any constructive role for government programs. There is a clear sense of how much better things were in the old days of a genderbased division of labor and low market-work rates for married women. Indeed, Becker is ready and able to show in Chapter 2 that such a state of affairs was efficient and induced not by market or societal discrimination (although he allows that it might exist) but by small underlying household productivity differences that arise primarily from what he refers to as "complementarities" between caring for young children while carrying another to term. Most family scholars would probably find that an unconvincingly simple explanation for a profound and complex phenomenon. What, then, is the salient contribution of Treatise on the Family? It is not literally the idea that economics could be applied to the nonmarket sector and to family life because Becker had already established that with considerable success and influence. At its core, microeconomics is simple, characterized by a belief in the importance of prices and markets, the role of self-interested or rational behavior, and, somewhat less centrally, the stability of preferences. It was Becker's singular and invaluable contribution to appreciate that the behaviors potentially amenable to the economic approach were not limited to phenomenon with explicit monetary prices and formal markets. Indeed, during the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s, he did undeniably important and pioneering work extending the domain of economics to such topics as labor market discrimination, fertility, crime, human capital, household production, and the allocation of time. Nor is Becker's contribution the detailed analyses themselves. Many of them are, frankly, odd, idiosyncratic, and off-putting. …

A Treatise on the Family

Returns to investment in education based on human capital theory have been estimated since the late 1950s. In the 40-plus year history of estimates of returns to investment in education, there have been several reviews of the empirical results in attempts to establish patterns. Many more estimates from a wide variety of countries, including over time evidence, and estimates based on new econometric techniques, reaffirm the importance of human capital theory. Psacharopoulos and Patrinos review and present the latest estimates and patterns as found in the literature at the turn of the century. However, because the availability of rate of return estimates has grown exponentially, the authors include a new section on the need for selectivity in comparing returns to investment in education and establishing related patterns. This paper - a product of the Education Sector Unit, Latin America and the Caribbean Region - is part of a larger effort in the region to document the benefits of investments in education.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/2881.pdf?abstractid=1273483

Returns to Investment in Education: A Further Update

Returns to investment in education based on human capital theory have been estimated since the late 1950s. In the 40-plus year history of estimates of returns to investment in education, there have been several reviews of the empirical results in attempts to establish patterns. Many more estimates from a wide variety of countries, including over time evidence, and estimates based on new econometric techniques, reaffirm the importance of human capital theory. The suthors review and present the latest estimates and patterns as found in the literature at the turn of the century. However, because the availability of rate of return estimates has grown exponentially, the authors include a new section on the need for selectivity in comparing returns to investment in education and establishing related patterns.

/pdf/returns-to-investment-in-education-a-further-update-2wkgtqwum8.pdf

Returns to investment in education: a further update

I am indebted to three referees for extremely helpful comments This paper was revised during my stay at the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, in March 1992 I thank colleagues and the library staff at Kiel for support I am grateful to the participants of a seminar at USAID for stimulating discussions I especially thank Jim Fox for his comments Roberto Schatan, Fernando Losada, and Abraham Vela, provided able assistance I am particularly indebted to Miguel Savastano for extensive assistance and comments on earlier versions of this paper Financial support from the Institute for Policy reform, the University of California Pacific Rim Program, and the National Science Foundation is gratefully acknowledged

Openness, Trade Liberalization and Growth In Developing Countries

One of the most important developments over the past three decades has been the spread of liberal economic ideas and policies throughout the world. These policies have affected the lives of millions of people, yet our most sophisticated political economy models do not adequately capture influences on these policy choices. Evidence suggests that the adoption of liberal economic practices is highly clustered both temporally and spatially. We hypothesize that this clustering might be due to processes of policy diffusion. We think of diffusion as resulting from one of two broad sets of forces: one in which mounting adoptions of a policy alter the benefits of adopting for others and another in which adoptions provide policy relevant information about the benefits of adopting. We develop arguments within these broad classes of mechanisms, construct appropriate measures of the relevant concepts, and test their effects on liberalization and restriction of the current account, the capital account, and the exchange rate regime. Our findings suggest that domestic models of foreign economic policy making are insufficient. The evidence shows that policy transitions are influenced by international economic competition as well as the policies of a country's sociocultural peers. We interpret the latter influence as a form of channeled learning reflecting governments' search for appropriate models for economic policy.

/pdf/the-globalization-of-liberalization-policy-diffusion-in-the-3182u08iz4.pdf

The Globalization of Liberalization: Policy Diffusion in the International Political Economy

https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w9766/w9766.pdf

International migration remittances and schooling: evidence from El Salvador.

Monetarism and Liberalization: The Chilean Experiment

We examine the effect of remittances from abroad on households' schooling decisions using data for El Salvador. Following the massive war-related emigration of the 1980's, remittances became a significant source of household income throughout the 1990's. We use the Cox proportional hazard model to examine the determinants of school attendance. Measuring income from a source that is uncorrelated with parental schooling remittances , we find that remittances have a large, significant effect on school retention. We estimate that while household income net of remittances has a small, though significant, impact on the hazard of leaving school in rural and urban areas, remittances have a much larger impact on the hazard of leaving school. In urban areas, the effect of remittances is, at its smallest, 10 times the size of the effect of other income. In rural areas, the effect of remittances is about 2.6 times that of other income. Our finding is of interest in that it suggests that subsidizing school attendance, particularly in poor areas, may have a large impact on school attendance and retention, even if parents have low levels of schooling.

International Migration, Remittances, and Schooling: Evidence from El Salvador

Pension systems may have a different impact on the two genders because women are less likely than men to work in formal labor markets and earn lower wages when they do. Recent multi-pillar pension reforms tighten the link between payroll contributions and benefits, leading critics to argue that they will hurt women. In contrast, supporters of these reforms argue that women will be helped by the removal of distortions pillar and the better targeted redistributions in the new systems. This paper examines the differential impact of the new and old systems in three Latin American countries – Chile, Argentina and Mexico. Based on household survey data, we simulate the wage and employment histories of representative men and women, the pensions that these are likely to generate under the new and old rules, and the relative gains or losses of the two genders due to the reform. We find that women do indeed accumulate private annuities that are only 30–40% those of men in the new systems. However, this effect is mitigated by sharp targeting of the new public pillars toward low earners, many of whom are women, and by restrictions on payouts from the private pillars, particularly joint annuity requirements. As a result, low-earning married women are the biggest gainers from the pension reform.

/pdf/the-gender-impact-of-pension-reform-2o7rf6m07t.pdf

Alejandra Cox Edwards

Papers

International migration remittances and schooling: evidence from El Salvador.

Monetarism and Liberalization: The Chilean Experiment

Monetarism and Liberalization: The Chilean Experiment

International Migration, Remittances, and Schooling: Evidence from El Salvador

The Gender Impact of Pension Reform