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

In a series of recent articles, Karlson, Holm, and Breen (Breen, Karlson, and Holm, 2011, http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstractid=1730065; Karlson and Holm, 2011, Research in Stratification and Social Mobility 29: 221- 237; Karlson, Holm, and Breen, 2010, http://www.yale.edu/ciqle/Breen Scaling %20effects.pdf) have developed a method for comparing the estimated coefficients of two nested nonlinear probability models. In this article, we describe this method and the user-written program khb, which implements the method. The KHB method is a general decomposition method that is unaffected by the rescaling or attenuation bias that arises in cross-model comparisons in nonlinear models. It recovers the degree to which a control variable, Z, mediates or explains the relationship between X and a latent outcome variable, Y ∗ , underlying the nonlin- ear probability model. It also decomposes effects of both discrete and continuous variables, applies to average partial effects, and provides analytically derived sta- tistical tests. The method can be extended to other models in the generalized linear model family.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1536867X1101100306

Comparing Coefficients of Nested Nonlinear Probability Models

Survey Errors and Survey Costs

There is abundant evidence that research collaboration has become the norm in every field of scientific and technical research. We provide a critical overview of the literature on research collaboration, focusing particularly on individual-level collaborations among university researchers, but we also give attention to university researchers’ collaborations with researchers in other sectors, including industry. We consider collaborations aimed chiefly at expanding the base of knowledge (knowledge-focused collaborations) as well as ones focused on production of economic value and wealth (property-focused collaborations), the latter including most academic entrepreneurship research collaborations. To help organize our review we develop a framework for analysis, one that considers attributes of collaborators, collaborative process and organization characteristics as the affect collaboration choices and outcomes. In addition, we develop and use a “Propositional Table for Research Collaboration Literature,” presented as an “Appendix” to this study. We conclude with some suggestions for possible improvement in research on collaboration including: (1) more attention to multiple levels of analysis and the interactions among them; (2) more careful measurement of impacts as opposed to outputs; (3) more studies on ‘malpractice’ in collaboration, including exploitation; (4) increased attention to collaborators’ motives and the social psychology of collaborative teams.

Research collaboration in universities and academic entrepreneurship: the-state-of-the-art

https://isiarticles.com/bundles/Article/pre/pdf/2226.pdf

Organizational and institutional influences on creativity in scientific research

While some believe that publication and citation scores are key predictors of breakthroughs in science, others claim that people who work at the intersection of scientific communities are more likely to be familiar with selecting and synthesizing alternatives into novel ideas. This paper contributes to this controversy by presenting a longitudinal comparison of highly creative scientists with equally productive researchers. The sample of creative scientists is identified by combining information on science awards and nominations by international peers covering research accomplishments in the mid-1990s. Results suggest that it is not only the sheer quantity of publications that causes scientists to produce creative pieces of work. Rather, their ability to effectively communicate with otherwise disconnected peers and to address a broader work spectrum also enhances their chances to be widely cited and to develop novel ideas.

https://econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/28529/1/537475559.pdf

Characterizing creative scientists in nano-S&T: Productivity, multidisciplinarity, and network brokerage in a longitudinal perspective

The increase in European divorce rates over the past decades was accompanied by several changes in divorce laws. Yet for European countries, research on the effects of divorce law on the divorce rate is scarce. Most of the existing studies are based on data from North America and provide numerous, but inconsistent, results. We use fixed-effects regression models to examine the impact of the introduction of unilateral divorce on the divorce rate in Western European countries. We find that de facto unilateral divorce practices led to a sustainable increase in the divorce rate, whereas legal rights to unilaterally divorce had no long-run effects.

Did Unilateral Divorce Laws Raise Divorce Rates in Western Europe

Fertility decisions typically involve two persons. This raises the question of how individual desires or preferences for further children transform into joint action. Previous research has proposed different approaches to this question, emphasizing gender, joint utility, consensus, or bargaining power. We use data from the German Family Panel (pairfam) to test competing hypotheses found in the literature. Our results show symmetrical effects of both partners' desires and expected utilities for children on proceptive behaviour, indicating that neither women nor men dominate fertility decisions per se. Instead, it is joint utility that matters. One partner will exercise a 'veto' only if the expected loss of utility from a further child is very high. When partners have opposed desires, bargaining power due to advantageous partner market conditions can play a pivotal role for imposing one's will on the partner.

Fertility From a Couple Perspective: A Test of Competing Decision Rules on Proceptive

Fertility decisions typically involve two persons. This raises the question of how individual desires or preferences for further children transform into joint action. Previous research has proposed different approaches to this question, emphasizing gender, joint utility, consensus, or bargaining power. We use data from the German Family Panel (pairfam) to test competing hypotheses found in the literature. Our results show symmetrical effects of both partners' desires and expected utilities for children on proceptive behaviour, indicating that neither women nor men dominate fertility decisions perse. Instead, it is joint utility that matters. One partner will exercise a 'veto' only if the expected loss of utility from a further child is very high. When partners have opposed desires, bargaining power due to advantageous partner market conditions can play a pivotal role for imposing one's will on the partner.

/pdf/fertility-from-a-couple-perspective-a-test-of-competing-3wdq04uu4r.pdf

Fertility From a Couple Perspective: A Test of Competing Decision Rules on Proceptive Behaviour

Zahlreiche Untersuchungen konzentrieren sich bei der Analyse fertilen Verhaltens auf Merkmale der Frau, deutlich weniger auf Merkmale des Mannes Die meisten Kinder werden jedoch in bestehenden Paarbeziehungen gezeugt und geboren Im vorliegenden Beitrag nehmen wir daher eine Paarperspektive ein und modellieren die Familiengrundung als partnerschaftliche Entscheidung Wir untersuchen hierbei vor allem die Bedeutung des je eigenen Bildungsniveaus in Abhangigkeit von dem des Partners und den Einfluss unterschiedlicher Bildungskonstellationen in Partnerschaften In unseren empirischen Analysen verwenden wir die Mikrozensen der Erhebungsjahre 1996 bis 2004, die es uns zum einen erlauben, detaillierte Bildungsniveaus auszuweisen und zum anderen auch seltene Bildungskonstellationen zu berucksichtigen Zunachst untersuchen wir den Einfluss des allgemeinen und beruflichen Bildungsniveaus beider Partner Mit Hilfe eines Quasi-Kohortendesigns berucksichtigen wir in unseren Analysen schlieslich den Zeitpunkt der Familiengrundung von Paaren mit in Mitte der 1960er und Mitte der 1970er Jahre geborenen Frauen Wir gelangen zu dem Ergebnis, dass ein traditionelles Bildungsgefalle auf Ebene beruflich qualifizierender Bildungszertifikate Elternschaften fordert, aber auch bildungshomogame Paare in Deutschland im Mittel haufiger Eltern sind als hypergame Paare

Gerrit Bauer

Papers

Characterizing creative scientists in nano-S&T: Productivity, multidisciplinarity, and network brokerage in a longitudinal perspective

Did Unilateral Divorce Laws Raise Divorce Rates in Western Europe

Fertility From a Couple Perspective: A Test of Competing Decision Rules on Proceptive

Fertility From a Couple Perspective: A Test of Competing Decision Rules on Proceptive Behaviour

Fertilitätsentscheidungen im Partnerschaftskontext