https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.2307%2F3343168.pdf

Development as Freedom

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 Statistics of Canada

A comprehensive account of economic size distributions around the world and throughout the years In the course of the past 100 years, economists and applied statisticians have developed a remarkably diverse variety of income distribution models, yet no single resource convincingly accounts for all of these models, analyzing their strengths and weaknesses, similarities and differences. Statistical Size Distributions in Economics and Actuarial Sciences is the first collection to systematically investigate a wide variety of parametric models that deal with income, wealth, and related notions. Christian Kleiber and Samuel Kotz survey, compliment, compare, and unify all of the disparate models of income distribution, highlighting at times a lack of coordination between them that can result in unnecessary duplication. Considering models from eight languages and all continents, the authors discuss the social and economic implications of each as well as distributions of size of loss in actuarial applications. Specific models covered include: Pareto distributions Lognormal distributions Gamma-type size distributions Beta-type size distributions Miscellaneous size distributions Three appendices provide brief biographies of some of the leading players along with the basic properties of each of the distributions. Actuaries, economists, market researchers, social scientists, and physicists interested in econophysics will find Statistical Size Distributions in Economics and Actuarial Sciences to be a truly one-of-a-kind addition to the professional literature.

Statistical Size Distributions in Economics and Actuarial Sciences

Often researchers find parametric models restrictive and sensitive to deviations from the parametric specifications; semi-nonparametric models are more flexible and robust, but lead to other complications such as introducing infinite-dimensional parameter spaces that may not be compact and the optimization problem may no longer be well-posed. The method of sieves provides one way to tackle such difficulties by optimizing an empirical criterion over a sequence of approximating parameter spaces (i.e., sieves); the sieves are less complex but are dense in the original space and the resulting optimization problem becomes well-posed. With different choices of criteria and sieves, the method of sieves is very flexible in estimating complicated semi-nonparametric models with (or without) endogeneity and latent heterogeneity. It can easily incorporate prior information and constraints, often derived from economic theory, such as monotonicity, convexity, additivity, multiplicity, exclusion and nonnegativity. It can simultaneously estimate the parametric and nonparametric parts in semi-nonparametric models, typically with optimal convergence rates for both parts. This chapter describes estimation of semi-nonparametric econometric models via the method of sieves. We present some general results on the large sample properties of the sieve estimates, including consistency of the sieve extremum estimates, convergence rates of the sieve M-estimates, pointwise normality of series estimates of regression functions, root-n asymptotic normality and efficiency of sieve estimates of smooth functionals of infinite-dimensional parameters. Examples are used to illustrate the general results.

Large Sample Sieve Estimation of Semi-Nonparametric Models

The literature on ethnically based earnings differentials in Canada has focused on differences either between whites and visible minorities or between particular ethnic groups. In this paper, the authors examine both earnings differentials between whites and visible minorities, and earnings differentials within the white and visible-minority groupings. Among both men and women they find substantial earnings differentials both between and within the white and visible-minority groupings. Differentials between whites and visible minorities suggest that the visible-minority category is a useful indicator of economic discrimination. Differentials within these groupings, however, suggest that it is only a rough indicator.

/pdf/the-colour-of-money-earnings-differentials-among-ethnic-32qdfwsndu.pdf

The Colour of Money: Earnings Differentials among Ethnic Groups in Canada

This paper considers the implementation of semiparametric methods in the empirical analysis of consumer demand. The application is to the estimation of the Engel curve relationship and uses the British Family Expenditure Survey. Household composition is modelled using an extended partially linear framework. This is shown to provide a useful method for pooling non-parametric Engel curves across households of different demographic composition. (C) 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Semiparametric estimation and consumer demand

Children's resources matter, but they are hard to identify because consumption is typically mea- sured at the household level. Modern collective household models permit some identication of indi- vidual household member resources, but these models typically either ignore children, or treat them as attributes of adults. We propose a collective household model in which children are people with their own utility functions (possibly assigned to them by parents). Extending the frameworks of Browning, Chiappori and Lewbel (2007) and Lewbel and Pendakur (2008), we show identication of children's resource shares within households. We invoke semiparametric restrictions on individual preferences and use data on the household-level consumption of assignable private goods to achieve identication of each individual's resource share within the household. We show this without being able to observe consumption by individual household members of goods that are partly or wholly shared goods within the household. Further, we obtain identication using only Engel curves, and so do not require ob- served price variation in the data. We estimate our model using data from Malawi andnd that as the number of children in a household grows, women's resource shares fall and children's resource shares rise, and men's resource shares are basically unchanged. We alsond evidence of gender bias against girls, and observe that the resource shares of mothers and children are increasing in the education level of the mother. Finally we use our estimates to construct poverty indices at the person level andnd that per-capita poverty indices understate the incidence of child poverty in Malawi.

/pdf/children-s-resources-in-collective-households-identification-3rmul4gsuo.pdf

Children's Resources in Collective Households: Identification, Estimation, and an Application to Child Poverty in Malawi

We propose an Exact Affine Stone Index (EASI) demand system, which delivers the convenient properties of Hicksian demands in an empirically simple framework. Like the Almost Ideal Demand (AID) system, EASI budget shares are linear in parameters given real expenditures. However, unlike AID, EASI demands can have any rank and its Engel curves can be polynomials or splines of any order in real expenditures. EASI error terms equal random utility parameters to account for unobserved preference heterogeneity. EASI demand functions can be estimated using ordinary GMM, and, like AID, an approximate EASI model can be estimated by linear regression.

/pdf/tricks-with-hicks-the-easi-demand-system-4kxql2vnc2.pdf

Tricks With Hicks: The Easi Demand System

We invent Implicit Marshallian demands, which combine desirable features of Hicksian and Marshallian demands. We propose and estimate the Exact Affine Stone Index (EASI) implicit Marshallian demand system. Like the Almost Ideal Demand (AID) system, EASI budget shares are linear in parameters given real expenditures. However, unlike the AID, EASI demands can have any rank and its Engel curves can have any shape over real expenditures. EASI error terms equal random utility parameters to account for unobserved preference heterogeneity. EASI demand functions can be estimated using GMM or three stage least squares, and, like AID, an approximate EASI model can be estimated by linear regression.

/pdf/tricks-with-hicks-the-easi-demand-system-3s06cx20gc.pdf

Krishna Pendakur

Papers

The Colour of Money: Earnings Differentials among Ethnic Groups in Canada

Semiparametric estimation and consumer demand

Children's Resources in Collective Households: Identification, Estimation, and an Application to Child Poverty in Malawi

Tricks With Hicks: The Easi Demand System

Tricks With Hicks: The EASI Demand System