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

This paper provides an introduction and “user guide” to Regression Discontinuity (RD) designs for empirical researchers. It presents the basic theory behind the research design, details when RD is likely to be valid or invalid given economic incentives, explains why it is considered a “quasi-experimental” design, and summarizes different ways (with their advantages and disadvantages) of estimating RD designs and the limitations of interpreting these estimates. Concepts are discussed using examples drawn from the growing body of empirical research using RD. ( JEL C21, C31)

/pdf/regression-discontinuity-designs-in-economics-5foiogfcmd.pdf

Regression discontinuity designs in economics

EIGHT members of the Yale Institute of Human Relations have co-operated to produce this book The result is not a mere juxtaposition of uncoordinated viewpoints but a unity of aim and consistency in presentation which make the multiple authorship almost undetectable Whatever judgment one may make about the value of the hypothesis elaborated in the book, there can be little doubt that the intimate collaboration of a team of specialists, each with a distinctive training, is a profitable way of examining a problem which has no clear-cut frontiers and which does not fall neatly into one of the conventional compartments of social study Frustration and Aggression By John Dollard Neal E Miller Leonard W Doob O H Mowrer Robert R Sears, in collaboration with Clellan S Ford, Carl Iver Hovland and Richard T Sollenberger (International Library of Sociology and Social Reconstruction) Pp ix + 150 (London: Kegan Paul and Co, Ltd, 1944) 10s 6d net

Frustration and Aggression

This paper reports on an experimental evaluation of strategies designed to improve academic performance among college freshmen. One treatment group was offered academic support services. Another was offered financial incentives for good grades. A third group combined both interventions. Service use was highest for women and for subjects in the combined group. The combined treatment also raised the grades and improved the academic standing of women. These differentials persisted through the end of second year, though incentives were given in the first year only. This suggests study skills among some treated women increased. In contrast, the program had no effect on men.

/pdf/incentives-and-services-for-college-achievement-evidence-4yh94qqudn.pdf

Incentives and Services for College Achievement: Evidence from a Randomized Trial

Job loss is an involuntary disruptive life event with a far-reaching impact on workers' life trajectories. Its incidence among growing segments of the workforce, alongside the recent era of severe economic upheaval, has increased attention to the effects of job loss and unemployment. As a relatively exogenous labor market shock, the study of displacement enables robust estimates of associations between socioeconomic circumstances and life outcomes. Research suggests that displacement is associated with subsequent unemployment, long-term earnings losses, and lower job quality; declines in psychological and physical well-being; loss of psychosocial assets; social withdrawal; family disruption; and lower levels of children's attainment and well-being. While reemployment mitigates some of the negative effects of job loss, it does not eliminate them. Contexts of widespread unemployment, although associated with larger economic losses, lessen the social-psychological impact of job loss. Future research should attend more fully to how the economic and social-psychological effects of displacement intersect and extend beyond displaced workers themselves.

/pdf/the-far-reaching-impact-of-job-loss-and-unemployment-flin3p73p0.pdf

The Far-Reaching Impact of Job Loss and Unemployment

We reconsider the effect of very low birth weight classification on infant mortality. We demonstrate that the estimates are highly sensitive to the exclusion of observations in the immediate vicinity of the 1,500-g threshold, weakening the confidence in the results originally reported in Almond, Doyle, Kowalski, and Williams (2010).

https://pages.uoregon.edu/waddell/papers/2011_QJE_Barreca-Guldi-Lindo-Waddell.pdf

Saving Babies? Revisiting the effect of very low birth weight classification

This study uses Monte Carlo simulations to demonstrate that regression-discontinuity designs arrive at biased estimates when attributes related to outcomes predict heaping in the running variable. After showing that our usual diagnostics may not be well suited to identifying this type of problem, we provide alternatives, and then discuss the usefulness of different approaches to addressing the bias. We then consider these issues in multiple non-simulated environments. (JEL C21, C14, I12)

/pdf/heaping-induced-bias-in-regression-discontinuity-designs-xjwmq6p24b.pdf

Heaping-induced bias in regression-discontinuity designs

Although there exists a large literature documenting various consequences of job loss, this paper is the first to explore the extent to which the health effects of job displacement extend to the children of displaced workers and also the first to consider whether there are any harmful effects for children who are not yet born when the separation occurs. I use detailed work and fertility histories from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to estimate the effect of parents' job displacements on children's birth weights. These data allow for an identification strategy that essentially compares the outcomes of children born after a displacement to the outcomes of their siblings born before using mother fixed effects. I find that husbandsﾒ job losses have significant negative effects on infant health. They reduce birth weights by approximately four and a half percent with suggestive evidence that the effect is concentrated on the lower half of the birth weight distribution.

Parental Job Loss and Infant Health

:This paper explores the causal link between income and fertility by analyzing women's fertility response to the large and permanent income shock generated by a husband's job displacement. I find that the shock reduces total fertility, suggesting that the causal effect of income on fertility is positive. A model that incorporates the time cost of children and assortative matching of spouses can simultaneously explain this result and the negative cross-sectional relationship. I also find that a husband's displacement accelerates childbearing, which is consistent with lifecycle models of fertility in which the incentive to delay is driven by expected earnings growth.

Are Children Really Inferior Goods?: Evidence from Displacement-Driven Income Shocks

http://papers.economics.ubc.ca/legacypapers/lindo.pdf

Jason M. Lindo

Papers

Saving Babies? Revisiting the effect of very low birth weight classification

Heaping-induced bias in regression-discontinuity designs

Parental Job Loss and Infant Health

Are Children Really Inferior Goods?: Evidence from Displacement-Driven Income Shocks

Parental job loss and infant health