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

Economics Of Discrimination

We discuss recent empirical research on how globalization has affected income inequality in developing countries. We begin with a discussion of conceptual issues regarding the measurement of globalization and inequality. Next, we present empirical evidence on the evolution of globalization and inequality in several developing countries during the 1980s and 1990s. We then examine the channels through which globalization may have affected inequality discussing theory and evidence in parellel. We conclude with directions for future research.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/nber_w12885.pdf?abstractid=961806&mirid=1&type=2

Distributional Effects of Globalization in Developing Countries

The authors discuss recent empirical research on how globalization has affected income inequality in developing countries. They begin with a discussion of conceptual issues regarding the measurement of globalization and inequality. Next, they present empirical evidence on the evolution of globalization and inequality in several developing countries during the 1980s and 1990s. The authors then examine the channels through which globalization may have affected inequality, discussing theory and evidence in parallel. They conclude with directions for future research.

/pdf/distributional-effects-of-globalization-in-developing-1ipn6atmvi.pdf

What Determines Female Autonomy? Evidence from Bangladesh ∗

Re-examination of uniform commodity taxes under a non-linear income tax system and its implication for production efficiency

Using satellite data on deforestation and weather in Malawi and linking those datasets with household survey datasets, we estimate the causal effect of deforestation on access to clean drinking water. In the existing literature on forest science and hydrology, the consensus is that deforestation increases water yield. In this study, we directly examine the causal effect of deforestation on households’ access to clean drinking water. Results of the two-stage least-squares (2SLS) with cluster and time fixed-effect estimations illustrate strong empirical evidence that deforestation decreases access to clean drinking water. Falsification tests show that the possibility of our instrumental variable picking up an unobserved time trend is very unlikely. We find that a 1.0-percentage-point increase in deforestation decreases access to clean drinking water by 0.93 percentage points. With this estimated impact, deforestation in the last decade in Malawi (14%) has had the same magnitude of effect on access to clean drinking water as that of a 9% decrease in rainfall.

https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/116/17/8249.full.pdf

Effect of deforestation on access to clean drinking water

Japan's labor standard law defines weekly legal work hours, and employers must pay a 25- percent wage premium for overtime. The number of legal work hours was 48 in 1987 and gradually declined to 40 by 1997. During the corresponding period, the average weekly hours of work dropped from 45 to 41, suggesting the causal effect of legal regulation on the actual hours of work. Exploiting the different timing of the regulation change by industry and establishment size, this paper estimates the causal impact of legal work hour restriction on actual hours worked. The analysis results indicate that a one-hour reduction of legal work hours led to a reduction of 0.14 actual hours worked, but it was not accompanied by a reduction in monthly cash earnings. The recruitment of new school graduates was suppressed in response to an increase in the hourly wage rate.

/pdf/labor-market-responses-to-legal-work-hour-reduction-evidence-nd5hnk3xth.pdf

Labor Market Responses to Legal Work Hour Reduction: Evidence from Japan 1

This paper examines the effect of Japan’s reduction of standard hours in the 1990s on labor market outcomes. Given that standard hours become discontinuous at certain establishment sizes, we employ a regression discontinuity design to estimate the impacts of the policy change. The theory predicts that policy change should unambiguously reduce hours worked in establishments with an initial workweek longer than the new standard hours but shorter than the old standard hours. The policy impact is expected to be zero for establishments with short hours, while it is ambiguous for establishments with very long hours. Indeed, the empirical analysis indicates that the reduction of standard hours significantly decreased hours worked in establishments whose hours are predicted to be between the old and new standard hours. Even in establishments with reduced working hours, monthly wages and annual bonuses did not decrease, leading to the increase in labor costs per hour. As a result, the policy change did not contribute to job creation. This paper demonstrates the importance of considering heterogeneous treatment effects, rather than the average treatment effects. When the policy impacts totally differ among groups, as in our case, estimating only the average treatment effect could mask the real impact. In addition, some groups actually affected by the policy may not be the ones targeted by the policy makers; in such cases, if there are heterogeneous treatment effects, unexpected outcomes can occur.

Assessing the effects of reducing standard hours: Regression discontinuity evidence from Japan

The gender wage gap among full-time workers has narrowed in the last 15 years in Japan. The demographic characteristics of full-time employees also has changed during the same period. The changed composition of workers could result in an observed gender wage convergence without any change in the underlying structure of the equilibrium o.ered wages. This paper develops a new method for estimating the convergence of the gender wage gap when the composition of workers of both genders changes. The newly developed estimators trim the wage distribution of certain groups characterized by observed characteristics so that the composition of workers in terms of these characteristics is stable over time. Applying two extreme trimming rules, based on two extreme distributional assumptions of unobserved characteristics, the trimming estimators identify the upper-and lower-bounds of the true gender wage convergence. The regression-adjusted gender wage gap for full-time workers has narrowed by 6 percentage points, changing from 33 percent in 1987 to 27 percent in 2002. However, the lower-bound estimate indicates an 18-percentage-point divergence and the upper-bound estimate indicates a 33-percentage-point convergence. However, once we assume that spousal income determines reservation wage, but not o.ered wage, we can signi.cantly tighten the bounds. The results highlight that the prediction from economic theory, combined with a reasonable excluded variable assumption, is crucial to making inferences about gender wage convergence in Japan. The method developed in this paper is applicable to other cases for examining the temporal variation of the average wage when the employment composition changes.

Hisahiro Naito

Papers

Re-examination of uniform commodity taxes under a non-linear income tax system and its implication for production efficiency

Effect of deforestation on access to clean drinking water

Labor Market Responses to Legal Work Hour Reduction: Evidence from Japan 1

Assessing the effects of reducing standard hours: Regression discontinuity evidence from Japan

The Bound Estimate of the Gender Wage Convergence under Employment Compositional Change