计量经济分析 = Econometric analysis

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 presents the overview of the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs) and their energy, land use, and emissions implications. The SSPs are part of a new scenario framework, established by the climate change research community in order to facilitate the integrated analysis of future climate impacts, vulnerabilities, adaptation, and mitigation. The pathways were developed over the last years as a joint community effort and describe plausible major global developments that together would lead in the future to different challenges for mitigation and adaptation to climate change. The SSPs are based on five narratives describing alternative socio-economic developments, including sustainable development, regional rivalry, inequality, fossil-fueled development, and middle-of-the-road development. The long-term demographic and economic projections of the SSPs depict a wide uncertainty range consistent with the scenario literature. A multi-model approach was used for the elaboration of the energy, land-use and the emissions trajectories of SSP-based scenarios. The baseline scenarios lead to global energy consumption of 400–1200 EJ in 2100, and feature vastly different land-use dynamics, ranging from a possible reduction in cropland area up to a massive expansion by more than 700 million hectares by 2100. The associated annual CO 2 emissions of the baseline scenarios range from about 25 GtCO 2 to more than 120 GtCO 2 per year by 2100. With respect to mitigation, we find that associated costs strongly depend on three factors: (1) the policy assumptions, (2) the socio-economic narrative, and (3) the stringency of the target. The carbon price for reaching the target of 2.6 W/m 2 that is consistent with a temperature change limit of 2 °C, differs in our analysis thus by about a factor of three across the SSP marker scenarios. Moreover, many models could not reach this target from the SSPs with high mitigation challenges. While the SSPs were designed to represent different mitigation and adaptation challenges, the resulting narratives and quantifications span a wide range of different futures broadly representative of the current literature. This allows their subsequent use and development in new assessments and research projects. Critical next steps for the community scenario process will, among others, involve regional and sectoral extensions, further elaboration of the adaptation and impacts dimension, as well as employing the SSP scenarios with the new generation of earth system models as part of the 6th climate model intercomparison project (CMIP6).

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The Shared Socioeconomic Pathways and their energy, land use, and greenhouse gas emissions implications: An overview

Financial systems are crucial to the allocation of resources in a modern economy. They channel household savings to the corporate sector and allocate investment funds among firms; they allow intertemporal smoothing of consumption by households and expenditures by firms; and they enable households and firms to share risks. These functions are common to the financial systems of most developed economies. Yet the form of these financial systems varies widely. In the United States and the United Kingdom competitive markets dominate the financial landscape, whereas in France, Germany, and Japan banks have traditionally played the most important role. Why do different countries have such different financial systems? Is one system better than all the others? Do different systems merely represent alternative ways of satisfying similar needs? Is the current trend toward market-based systems desirable? Franklin Allen and Douglas Gale argue that the view that market-based systems are best is simplistic. A more nuanced approach is necessary. For example, financial markets may be bad for risk sharing; competition in banking may be inefficient; financial crises can be good as well as bad; and separation of ownership and control can be optimal. Financial institutions are not simply veils, disguising the allocation mechanism without affecting it, but are crucial to overcoming market imperfections. An optimal financial system relies on both financial markets and financial intermediaries.

比较金融系统 = Comparing financial systems

The family is not a static institution. In recent decades, marriage rates have fallen, divorce rates have risen, and the defining characteristics of marriage have changed. The economic approach to the family seeks to explain these trends by reference to models that can also explain how and why families form. Gary Becker’s (1981) Treatise on the Family proposed a theory based on “production complementarities,” in which husband and wife specialize in the market and domestic spheres, respectively. Production complementarities also arise in the production and rearing of one’s own children. However, production complementarities—at least as initially described—are decreasingly central to modern family life. Increased longevity and declining fertility mean that most of one’s adult life is spent without one’s own children in the household. Also, the rise in marital formation at older ages, including remarriage, means that many families form with no intention of producing children. Moreover, increases in female labor force participation suggest that household specialization has either declined or, at least taken on a different meaning. These changes have come about as what is produced in the home has been dramatically altered both by the emergence of labor-saving technology in the home and by the development of service industries that allow much of what was once provided by specialized homemakers to be purchased in the market. The availabil

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Marriage and Divorce: Changes and their Driving Forces

In this paper we provide a review of the literature on the link between stock market volatility and aggregate demand. In particular, we focus on the implications of the so-called uncertainty hypothesis according to which it is primarily the uncertainty associated with stock market fluctuations that influences aggregate demand. Empirical studies find that stock market volatility indeed feeds back into the real economy.

Stock Market Volatility and the Business Cycle

Panel data is used to investigate the extent of R and D spillovers between OECD countries, and the importance of barriers to technology adoption in affecting the benefits of such spillovers. Our results indicate that countries with less regulated goods and labour markets benefit more from foreign R and D.

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Barriers to technology adoption, international R and D spillovers and growth

Interest rate pass-through, monetary policy rules and macroeconomic stability☆

This paper explores the price-setting behavior of Austrian firms based on survey evidence. Our main result is that customer relationships are a major source of price stickiness in the Austrian economy. We also find that the majority of firms in our sample follows a time-dependent pricing strategy. However, a substantial fraction of firms deviates from time-dependent pricing in the case of large shocks and switches to a state-dependent pricing strategy. In addition, we present evidence suggesting that the price response to various shocks is subject to asymmetries.

The Price-Setting Behavior of Austrian Firms: Some Survey Evidence

In this paper we analyze empirically how labor market institutions influence business cycle volatility in a sample of 20 OECD countries. Our results suggest that countries characterized by high union density tend to experience more volatile movements in output, whereas the degree of coordination of the wage bargaining system and the strictness of employment protection legislation appear to be only of limited importance. We also find some evidence suggesting that highly coordinated wage bargaining systems have a dampening impact on inflation volatility.

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Johann Scharler

Papers

Stock Market Volatility and the Business Cycle

Barriers to technology adoption, international R and D spillovers and growth

Interest rate pass-through, monetary policy rules and macroeconomic stability☆

The Price-Setting Behavior of Austrian Firms: Some Survey Evidence

Labor market institutions and macroeconomic volatility in a panel of oecd countries