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

We investigate whether income inequality affects subsequent growth in a cross-country sample for 1965-90, using the models of Barro (1997), Bleaney and Nishiyama (2002) and Sachs and Warner (1997), with negative results. We then investigate the evolution of income inequality over the same period and its correlation with growth. The dominating feature is inequality convergence across countries. This convergence has been significantly faster amongst developed countries. Growth does not appear to influence the evolution of inequality over time. Outline

https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/81822/1/02-28.pdf

Economic growth and income inequality

This paper proposes a new methodology for multidimensional poverty measurement consisting of an identification method ρk that extends the traditional intersection and union approaches, and a class of poverty measures Mα. Our identification step employs two forms of cutoff: one within each dimension to determine whether a person is deprived in that dimension, and a second across dimensions that identifies the poor by ‘counting’ the dimensions in which a person is deprived. The aggregation step employs the FGT measures, appropriately adjusted to account for multidimensionality. The axioms are presented as joint restrictions on identification and the measures, and the methodology satisfies a range of desirable properties including decomposability. The identification method is particularly well suited for use with ordinal data, as is the first of our measures, the adjusted headcount ratio. We present some dominance results and an interpretation of the adjusted headcount ratio as a measure of unfreedom. Examples from the US and Indonesia illustrate our methodology.

Counting and Multidimensional Poverty Measurement

Difference-in-Differences with multiple time periods

To estimate the dynamic effects of an absorbing treatment, researchers often use two-way fixed effects regressions that include leads and lags of the treatment. We show that in settings with variation in treatment timing across units, the coefficient on a given lead or lag can be contaminated by effects from other periods, and apparent pretrends can arise solely from treatment effects heterogeneity. We propose an alternative estimator that is free of contamination, and illustrate the relative shortcomings of two-way fixed effects regressions with leads and lags through an empirical application.

Estimating Dynamic Treatment Effects in Event Studies with Heterogeneous Treatment Effects

This paper provides evidence on growth and income poverty in Latin American and the Caribbean. Results are obtained by processing microdata from household surveys of 18 LAC countries covering the 1990s and early 2000s. Over this period the LAC economies have experienced very heterogeneous patterns of growth and poverty changes. Most countries in the region have had a rather meager performance in terms of poverty reduction. Episodes of positive, significant and unambiguously pro-poor income growth have been rare in Latin America in the last 15 years.

/pdf/growth-and-income-poverty-in-latin-america-and-the-caribbean-4adx48zurd.pdf

Growth and income poverty in latin america and the caribbean: evidence from household surveys

This paper uses microeconometric simulations to characterize the distributional changes occurred in the Bolivian economy in the period 1993-2002, and to assess the potential distributional impact of various alternative economic scenarios for the next decade. Wage equations for urban and rural areas estimated by both OLS and quantile regression are the main inputs for the microsimulations. A sizeable increase in the dispersion in worker unobserved wage determinants is the main factor behind the significant increase in household income inequality in the 90s. The results of the microsimulations suggest a small poverty-reducing effect of several potential scenarios, including education upgrading, sectoral transformations, labor informality reduction, gender and race wage gap closing, and changes in the structure of the returns to education. Sustainable and vigorous productivity growth seems to be a necessary condition for Bolivia to meet the poverty Millennium Development Goal by 2015.

Simulating Income Distribution Changes in Bolivia: a Microeconometric Approach

En el presente trabajo se estudia conjuntamente la estabilidad ocupacional y salarial en Argentina durante los anos 1998-2002. Usando paneles construidos a partir de la EPH, se analiza la forma en la cual las caracteristicas del trabajador impactan en la volatilidad salarial y en las probabilidades de perder o conseguir empleo. Se encuentra evidencia indicando que aquellos individuos con salarios relativamente bajos son los que enfrentan las mayores oscilaciones en sus ingresos y la mas alta rotacion empleo-desempleo. Durante el periodo de mayor profundidad de la crisis la inestabilidad ocupacional se duplico y la movilidad salarial relativa se mantuvo estable.

https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/189566/1/doc_cedlas11.pdf

Dinámica salarial y ocupacional: análisis de panel para Argentina 1998-2002

This paper explores the potential link between trade and labor outcomes in rural areas in Latin America by estimating cross household-survey regression models with microdata from 60 Latin American household surveys and country aggregate data We find a significant positive association between labor outcomes in rural areas and some measures of international trade, in particular exports, trade as a share of GDP, and the price of exports International trade has been associated with higher wages and labor income in rural areas, in particular for those workers located in the bottom quantiles of the conditional wage distribution Instead, our results suggest that all individuals in rural areas benefit about the same due to higher export prices Results for urban areas are rarely statistically significant

Trade and Labor Outcomes in Latin America's Rural Areas: A Cross-Household Surveys Approach

Summary
This paper considers the difference-in-differences (DID) method when the data come from repeated cross-sections and the treatment status is observed either before or after the implementation of a program. We propose a new method that point-identifies the average treatment effect on the treated (ATT) via a DID method when there is at least one proxy variable for the latent treatment. Key assumptions are the stationarity of the propensity score conditional on the proxy and an exclusion restriction that the proxy must satisfy with respect to the change in average outcomes over time conditional on the true treatment status. We propose a generalized method of moments estimator for the ATT and we show that the associated overidentification test can be used to test our key assumptions. The method is used to evaluate JUNTOS, a Peruvian conditional cash transfer program. We find that the program significantly increased the demand for health inputs among children and women of reproductive age.

Federico H. Gutierrez

Papers

Growth and income poverty in latin america and the caribbean: evidence from household surveys

Simulating Income Distribution Changes in Bolivia: a Microeconometric Approach

Dinámica salarial y ocupacional: análisis de panel para Argentina 1998-2002

Trade and Labor Outcomes in Latin America's Rural Areas: A Cross-Household Surveys Approach

Difference‐in‐differences when the treatment status is observed in only one period