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Showing papers by "Gary S. Becker published in 1973"


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, the skeleton of a theory of marriage is presented, which assumes that each person tries to do as well as possible and that the "marriage market" is in equilibrium.
Abstract: I present in this paper the skeleton of a theory of marriage. The two basic assumptions are that each person tries to do as well as possible and that the "marriage market" is in equilibrium. With the aid of several additional simplifying assumptions, I derive a number of significant implications about behavior in this market. For example, the gain to a man and woman from marrying compared to remaining single is shown to depend positively on their incomes, human capital, and relative difference in wage rates. The theory also implies that men differing in physical capital, education or intelligence (aside from their effects on wage rates), height, race, or many other traits will tend to marry women with like values of these traits, whereas the correlation between mates for wage rates or for traits of men and women that are close substitutes in household production will tend to be negative. The theory does not take the division of output between mates as given, but rather derives it from the nature of the ma...

3,156 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: De Tray and Willis as discussed by the authors argued that the negative relation between quantity and quality often observed is a consequence of a low substitution elasticity in a family's utility function between parents' consumption or level of living and that of their children.
Abstract: Students of human fertility have been aware for a long time that there may be some special relation between the number (quantity) of children ever born to a family and the "quality" of their children as perceived by others if not by the parents. One need only cite the negative correlation between quantity and quality of children per family so often observed in both cross-section and time-series data. One of us (Becker 1960) more than a decade ago stressed the importance for understanding fertility (quantity) of the interaction between quantity and quality, and we are pleased to note that this interaction is emphasized in most of the papers in this Supplement, especially those by De Tray and Willis. Some economists have argued that the negative relation between quantity and quality often observed is a consequence of a low substitution elasticity in a family's utility function between parents' consumption or level of living and that of their children (see, e.g., Duesenberry 1960; Willis 1969). The approach followed by De Tray in this volume is different, but it makes equally special assumptions about the substitution between quantity and quality in the utility function and in household production.

2,121 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
01 Dec 1973
TL;DR: The authors advocates a reformulation of the theory of consumer behavior, based on the household production function approach suggested in Becker's "A Theory of the Allocation of Time" [1].
Abstract: This essay advocates a reformulation of the theory of consumer behavior, based on the household production function approach suggested in Becker's "A Theory of the Allocation of Time" [1]. The case for the reformulation rests, in part, on inadequacies of the traditional theory of choice, and more importantly, on the new approach's capacity to generate a wide range of cogent testable hypotheses and to provide the social scientist with tools relevant for understanding a broad spectrum of observed human behavior.

501 citations