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

The converging roles of men and women are among the grandest advances in society and the economy in the last century. These aspects of the grand gender convergence are figurative chapters in a history of gender roles. But what must the “last” chapter contain for there to be equality in the labor market? The answer may come as a surprise. The solution does not (necessarily) have to involve government intervention and it need not make men more responsible in the home (although that wouldn't hurt). But it must involve changes in the labor market, especially how jobs are structured and remunerated to enhance temporal flexibility. The gender gap in pay would be considerably reduced and might vanish altogether if firms did not have an incentive to disproportionately reward individuals who labored long hours and worked particular hours. Such change has taken off in various sectors, such as technology, science, and health, but is less apparent in the corporate, financial, and legal worlds. (JEL J3, J16, ...

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A Grand Gender Convergence: Its Last Chapter

Utility Analysis and the Consumption Function: An Interpretation of Cross-Section Data

https://hceconomics.uchicago.edu/sites/default/files/file_uploads/2_HO_Corak_2013_Income-Inequality-JEP-HO_STATIC_2016-01-02a_jld.pdf

Extract from \Income Inequality, Equality of Opportunity, and Intergenerational Mobility"

Heterogeneity in Human Capital Investments: High School Curriculum, College Major, and Careers. NBER Working Paper No. 17985.

This paper examines the equilibrium effects of alternative financial aid policies intended to promote college participation We build an overlapping generations life-cycle, heterogeneous-agent, incomplete-markets model with education, labor supply, and consumption/saving decisions Driven by both altruism and paternalism, parents make inter vivos transfers to their children Both cognitive and non-cognitive skills determine the non-pecuniary cost of schooling Labor supply during college, government grants and loans, as well as private loans, complement parental resources as means of funding college education We find that the current financial aid system in the US improves welfare, and removing it would reduce GDP by 4-5 percentage points in the long-run Further expansions of government-sponsored loan limits or grants would have no salient aggregate effects because of substantial crowding-out: every additional dollar of government grants crowds out 30 cents of parental transfers plus an equivalent amount through a reduction in student’s labor supply However, a small group of high-ability children from poor families, especially girls, would greatly benefit from more generous federal aid

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Education Policy And Intergenerational Transfers in Equilibrium

Is skill dispersion a source of comparative advantage? While it is established that a country's aggregate endowment of human capital is an important determinant of comparative advantage, this paper investigates whether the distribution of skills in the labor force can play a role in the determination of trade ‡ows. We develop a multi-country, multi-sector model of trade in which comparative advantage derives from (i) dierences across sectors in the complementarity of workers' skills, (ii) the dispersion of skills in the working population. We …rst illustrate how higher dispersion in human capital can trigger specialization in sectors characterized by higher substitutability among workers'skills. Then we use industry-level bilateral trade data to show that human capital dispersion, as measured by a standard international metric, has a signi…cant eect on trade ‡ows. We …nd that the eect is of a magnitude comparable to that of aggregate endowments, as measured in the literature. The result is robust to the introduction of controls for several causes of comparative advantage, as well as to alternative measures of skill complementarity.

/pdf/skill-dispersion-and-trade-flows-dd9tmpsck0.pdf

Skill Dispersion and Trade Flows

This paper compares partial and general equilibrium effects of alternative financial aid policies intended to promote college participation. We build an overlapping generations life-cycle, heterogeneous-agent, incomplete-markets model with education, labor supply, and consumption/saving decisions. Altruistic parents make inter vivos transfers to their children. Labor supply during college, government grants and loans, as well as private loans, complement parental transfers as sources of funding for college education. We find that the current financial aid system in the U.S. improves welfare, and removing it would reduce GDP by two percentage points in the long-run. Any further relaxation of government-sponsored loan limits would have no salient effects. The short-run partial equilibrium effects of expanding tuition grants (especially their need-based component) are sizeable. However, long-run general equilibrium effects are 3-4 times smaller. Every additional dollar of government grants crowds out 20-30 cents of parental transfers.

Education policy and intergenerational transfers in equilibrium

Structural transformation and the rise of information technology

(they are crowded out). Thus the subsidy strongly acts on the composition of those in education. We find that subsidies made conditional on financial resources are generally preferable to those conditional on ability and large equilibrium effects can be induced by relatively small changes in marginal returns. We also evaluate the effects of changes in the relative burden of labor vis-a-vis capital taxes.

Giovanni Gallipoli

Papers

Education Policy And Intergenerational Transfers in Equilibrium

Skill Dispersion and Trade Flows

Education policy and intergenerational transfers in equilibrium

Structural transformation and the rise of information technology

Equilibrium Effects of Education Policies: a Quantitative Evaluation