Gary S. Becker

Bio: Gary S. Becker is an academic researcher from University of Chicago. The author has contributed to research in topics: Human capital & Consumption (economics). The author has an hindex of 94, co-authored 227 publications receiving 135183 citations. Previous affiliations of Gary S. Becker include Columbia University & EAFIT University.

Explaining the Worldwide Boom in Higher Education of Women

Abstract: The last 40 years have witnessed a remarkable boom in higher education, particularly of women. Today in most higher-income countries and many lower-income countries, more women than men complete tertiary education. We present a model of the market for college graduates in which supply is a function of the distribution of the costs and benefits of college across individuals. We find little evidence that benefits are higher for women. It appears that differences in the total costs of college for women and men—primarily differences in the distributions of noncognitive skills—explain the overtaking of men by women in higher education.

Welfare Measurement in the Household Production Framework

Abstract: The household production approach to consumer behavior, developed from the work of Gary Becker, William Gorman, and Kelvin Lancaster, has considerable descriptive appeal in modelling the decisions of households The approach derives from the observation that households frequently purchase market goods that do not yield utility directly, but are combined to produce commodity service flows which the household values Thus observed behavior is determined by household production technology as well as by tastes The advantage of this distinction is that we can pose reasonable hypotheses about characteristics of technology, though we rarely possess useful a priori information regarding tastes The putative advantages of the household production approach are questioned on empirical and conceptual grounds by Robert Pollak and Michael Wachter (1975) They show that jointness in production or nonconstant returns to scale cause implicit commodity prices to depend on both tastes and technology, raising serious econometric difficulties in the estimation of commodity demand functions In addition, since commodity prices become functions of the commodity bundle consumed, the analogy to traditional demand theory breaks down Joint production occurs when a good enters several production processes simultaneously, or, equivalently, when a good in one production process also enters directly into the individual's utility function The most common example is time, which provides the context for all production processes and is often associated with the production of several commodities simultaneously Since joint production in the household is likely to be pervasive, the critique by Pollak and Wachter cannot be ignored In response to the comment by William Barnett, Pollak and Wachter (1977) suggest dispensing with the notion of commodity prices and treating the demand for commodities as a function of goods prices This approach confounds tastes and technology, but it eliminates the troublesome concept of commodity prices as parameters when, in fact, they are likely to be endogenous In this paper we show that results from positive analysis, such as the critique by Pollak and Wachter, have implications for the use of the household production framework for welfare analysis The household production function approach has had considerable appeal for measuring welfare effects of public actions in the environmental and natural resource areas (Gardner Brown, John Charbonneau, and Michael Hay; Elizabeth Wilman) Yet traditional approaches to welfare measurement are frequently inapplicable We argue that welfare measurement in this framework is complicated by the difficulties of unravelling tastes and technology We extend Pollak and Wachter's results by demonstrating that Marshallian demand functions for commodities cannot be uniquely defined Thus Marshallian functions cannot be used to derive exact compensated functions in the manner of Jerry Hausman, and of George McKenzie and I F Pearce, nor can compensating and equivalent variation measures be bounded by Marshallian consumer's surplus estimates following Robert Willig In fact, duality results that normally allow us to move between Marshallian and Hicksian functions are not *Assistant and Associate Professors, respectively, Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742 This paper is Scientific Article No A3404, Contribution No 6476, of the Maryland Agricultural Experiment Station We wish to thank Darrell Hueth, James Opaluch, V Kerry Smith, and Elizabeth Wilman for comments on an earlier draft

Explaining the Worldwide Boom in Higher Education of Women

Abstract: The last forty years have witnessed a remarkable boom in higher education around the world. Importantly, the boom in higher education has been concentrated among women, such that today in most higher-income countries, and many lower-income countries, more women than men attend and complete tertiary education. We present a model that explains the increase in higher education, particularly among women, in terms of a market for college graduates in which the supply of college graduates is function of the distribution of the costs and benefits of higher education across individuals. Examining evidence on these costs and benefits, we find no clear evidence that benefits are greater for women than men. Instead, it appears that differences in the total costs of college for women and men - primarily due to differences in the distributions of non-cognitive skills for women and men - explain the overtaking of men by women in higher education.

Social Capital in the Creation of Human Capital

Abstract: In this paper, the concept of social capital is introduced and illustrated, its forms are described, the social structural conditions under which it arises are examined, and it is used in an analys...

Forms of Capital

Abstract: The social world is accumulated history, and if it is not to be reduced to a discontinuous series of instantaneous mechanical equilibria between agents who are treated as interchangeable particles, one must reintroduce into it the notion of capital and with it, accumulation and all its effects. Capital is accumulated labor (in its materialized form or its ‘incorporated,’ embodied form) which, when appropriated on a private, i.e., exclusive, basis by agents or groups of agents, enables them to appropriate social energy in the form of reified or living labor. It is a vis insita, a force inscribed in objective or subjective structures, but it is also a lex insita, the principle underlying the immanent regularities of the social world. It is what makes the games of society – not least, the economic game – something other than simple games of chance offering at every moment the possibility of a miracle. Roulette, which holds out the opportunity of winning a lot of money in a short space of time, and therefore of changing one’s social status quasi-instantaneously, and in which the winning of the previous spin of the wheel can be staked and lost at every new spin, gives a fairly accurate image of this imaginary universe of perfect competition or perfect equality of opportunity, a world without inertia, without accumulation, without heredity or acquired properties, in which every moment is perfectly independent of the previous one, every soldier has a marshal’s baton in his knapsack, and every prize can be attained, instantaneously, by everyone, so that at each moment anyone can become anything. Capital, which, in its objectified or embodied forms, takes time to accumulate and which, as a potential capacity to produce profits and to reproduce itself in identical or expanded form, contains a tendency to persist in its being, is a force inscribed in the objectivity of things so that everything is not equally possible or impossible. And the structure of the distribution of the different types and subtypes of capital at a given moment in time represents the immanent structure of the social world, i.e. , the set of constraints, inscribed in the very reality of that world, which govern its functioning in a durable way, determining the chances of success for practices.

The mechanics of economic development

Abstract: This paper considers the prospects for constructing a neoclassical theory of growth and international trade that is consistent with some of the main features of economic development. Three models are considered and compared to evidence: a model emphasizing physical capital accumulation and technological change, a model emphasizing human capital accumulation through schooling, and a model emphasizing specialized human capital accumulation through learning-by-doing.