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

A detailed review of the education sector in Australia as in the data provided by the 2006 edition of the OECD's annual publication, 'Education at a Glance' is presented. While the data has shown that in almost all OECD countries educational attainment levels are on the rise, with countries showing impressive gains in university qualifications, it also reveals that a large of share of young people still do not complete secondary school, which remains a baseline for successful entry into the labour market.

/pdf/education-at-a-glance-m5vl7o68j5.pdf

Education at a Glance

Contrasting treatment‐specific survival using double‐robust estimators

Families That Work: Policies for Reconciling Parenthood and Employment. Janet C. Gornick and Marcia K. Meyers. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. 2003. 392 pp. ISBN 0-87154-356-7. $39.95 (cloth). This book begins with the phrase "imagine a world," which aptly describes the authors' aim. The "world" that Janet Gornick and Marcia Meyers imagine is a "dual-earner-dual-carer" U.S. society, a "fully gender-egalitarian, economically secure, caring society" (p. 4). They acknowledge the enormous magnitude of transformation that would be required for such an end vision to be achieved, but point out that without a clear end vision, such a transformation would be impossible. Gornick and Meyers propose that a dual-earner-dual-carer society can be achieved through three key changes: 1) Shifting several hours per week of men's time from paid work to care for children, and a smaller number of women's hours from home to paid work 2) Creating new employment arrangements to allow men and women to take time for parenting without excessive financial or advancement penalties in the workplace 3) Reducing standard working hours and expanding paid family leave and public funding for child care Although not given a great deal of space in the book, I was intrigued by Gornick and Meyers's analysis of tension among three discourses about work and family. Advocates for children tend to favor policies such as child tax credits and maternity leaves that make it easier for mothers to stay at home with young children, temporarily opting out of the labor market. Discourse about work-family conflict tends to favor policies that make it easier for women to be workers and parents simultaneously, such as part-time work, job sharing, and flexible schedules. Feminists emphasize the pursuit of gender equality by improving access to high-quality nonparental care for children and access to high-quality jobs for women. The problem with each of these solutions, according to Gornick and Meyers, is that they pit gender equality against the interests of children, in each case sacrificing one interest in favor of the other, and in all cases sidestepping the need for change in men's behavior. The dual-earner-dual-carer vision is an effort to simultaneously pursue both goals by transforming both men's and women's roles. Much of the book is devoted to articulating shortcomings in U.S. policies relative to other industrialized nations in North America or Europe. While the theme is familiar, the book includes an expansive, data-driven, and clear articulation of the evidence, drawing on national data sets and the content of specific regulations in several countries. For example, the U.S. spends $650 per child and 0.5% of its GDP on children, less than half the amounts allocated by countries in Scandinavia and Western Europe. Policy data are juxtaposed with an embarrassing litany of poor outcomes for children in the United States relative to their peers in other countries: high rates of low birth weight and mortality among infants, low achievement scores in science and math and high levels of television watching among school children, and high rates of teen pregnancy. …

Families that work: Policies for reconciling parenthood and employment

This article discusses the diversity of family policy models in 28 oecd countries in terms of the balance between their different objectives and the mix of instruments adopted to implement the policies. cross-country policy differences are investigated by applying a principal component analysis to comprehensive country-level data from the oecd Family database covering variables such as parental leave conditions, childcare service provision, and fnancial support to families. the results fnd persistent differences in the family policy patterns embedded in different contexts of work-family “outcomes.” country classifcations of family policy packages only partially corroborate categorizations in earlier studies, owing to considerable within-group heterogeneity and the presence of group outliers. the nordic countries outdistance the others with comprehensive support to working parents with very young children. anglo-Saxon countries provide much less support for working parents with very young children, and fnancial support is targeted on low-income and large families and focuses on preschool and early elementary education. continental and eastern european countries form a more heterogeneous group, while the support received by families in Southern europe and in asian countries is much lower in all its dimensions.

Family Policies in OECD Countries: A Comparative Analysis

https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/161184/1/dp10561.pdf

Involuntary job loss and changes in personality traits

Despite increasing access to university education, students from disadvantaged or non-academic family backgrounds are still underrepresented at universities. In this regard, the economic literature mainly studies the effect of financial constraints on post-secondary educational decisions. Our knowledge on potential effects of other constraints regarding university education is more limited. We investigate the causal relationship between information and educational expectations using data from a German randomized controlled trial in which students in high schools were treated with information on the benefits as well as on different funding possibilities for university education. We find that the provision of information increases intended college enrollment for students from a non-academic family background, while it leads students from academic backgrounds to lower their enrollment intentions. Our results suggest that educational inequality can be reduced by providing students with relevant information, while simultaneously improving post-secondary education matches.

Intended College Enrollment and Educational Inequality: Do Students Lack Information?

Intended college enrollment and educational inequality: Do students lack information?

This report presents the results of a first attempt to create a framework for assessing the performance
of national family policies. The report is part of a joint EU and OECD project, which aims to help the EU
Government Expert Group on Demographic Issues in evaluating national family policies. The idea behind
the framework is that it allows individual countries to compare their overall performance in the area of
family policies with the performance of other countries. The main focus of the report is policies for
families with smaller children.
The framework provides a set of cross-nationally comparable indicators on contexts, policy measures,
and outcomes, organised on a systematic basis. The policy measure indicators presented in the report cover
leave schemes, early childhood education and care, family benefits and workplace policies. The indicators
build upon, inter alia, previous work by the OECD in various studies on family-friendly policies that were
carried out on a cross-national basis using different sets of indicators. Most of these indicators are today
available in the OECD Family Database. Wherever the OECD Family Database contains indicators for the
majority of EU member states and OECD countries, these data have been used in the present study.
Otherwise, data from other cross-national databases have been included.
Each indicator in the framework is presented as a single-standing indicator in the general absence of
scientific consensus on different aggregation weights. In the report no explicit ranking of countries has
been attempted, instead the relative position of countries has been illustrated with the help of standard
deviation scores.
In the last part of the report the linkages between policy aims and the various context, outcome and
policy measures are indicated, which help construct “score cards”. This “score card-approach” is illustrated
for three countries: Denmark, Germany and the United Kingdom.
The report offers tools for assessment that may be developed further, and should offer an approach to
using the OECD Family Database, acknowledging this unique data source for cross-country comparisons
in the field of family policy.

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Frauke Peter

Papers

Involuntary job loss and changes in personality traits

Intended College Enrollment and Educational Inequality: Do Students Lack Information?

Intended college enrollment and educational inequality: Do students lack information?

Towards a framework for assessing family policies in the eu

The effect of involuntary maternal job loss on children's behaviour and non-cognitive skills