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 Day Reconstruction Method (DRM) assesses how people spend their time and how they experience the various activities and settings of their lives, combining features of time-budget measurement and experience sampling. Participants systematically reconstruct their activities and experiences of the preceding day with procedures designed to reduce recall biases. The DRM's utility is shown by documenting close correspondences between the DRM reports of 909 employed women and established results from experience sampling. An analysis of the hedonic treadmill shows the DRM's potential for well-being research.

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A Survey Method for Characterizing Daily Life Experience: The Day Reconstruction Method

This chapter surveys existing approaches to modeling labor supply and identifies important gaps in the literature that could be addressed in future research. The discussion begins with a look at recent policy reforms and labor market facts that motivate the study of labor supply. The analysis then presents a unifying framework that allows alternative empirical formulations of the labor supply model to be compared and their resulting elasticities to be interpreted. This is followed by critical reviews of alternative approaches to labor-supply modeling. The first review assesses the difference-in-differences approach and its relationship to natural experiments. The second analyzes estimation with non-linear budget constraints and welfare-program participation. The third appraises developments of family labor-supply models including both the standard unitary and collective labor-supply formulations. The fourth briefly explores dynamic extensions of the labor supply model, characterizing how participation decisions, learning-by-doing, human capital accumulation and habit formation affect the analysis of the lifecycle model. At the end of each of the four broad reviews, we summarize a selection of the recent empirical findings. The concluding section asks whether the developments reviewed in this chapter place us in a better position to answer the policy-reform questions and to interpret the trends in participation and hours with which we began this review. © 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

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Labor Supply: A Review of Alternative Approaches

This section offers suggestions related to helping a student deal with bullying in schools, as well as creating an environment where that individual can easily return to the school community. It also mentions the significance of the method 'Shared Responsibility' in dealing with the situation.

Assessing the Impact

This paper reviews the economic literature on welfare reform over the 1990s. A brief summary of the policy changes is followed by a discussion of the methodological techniques that analyze the effects of these changes on outcomes. The paper then critically reviews the econometric and experimental literature on caseload changes, labor force changes, poverty and income changes, and family formation changes. A growing body of evidence suggests that recent policy changes have influenced economic behavior and well-being. One particular set of "new-style" welfare programs seems to show especially promising results, with significantly increased work and earnings and reduced poverty.

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Evaluating Welfare Reform in the United States

This contribution analyzes how men and women in France, Italy, Sweden, and the United States use their time over the life cycle and the extent to which societal and institutional contexts influence the gender division of labor. In order to test the hypothesis that contextual factors play a crucial role in shaping time allocation, this study considers countries that diverge considerably in terms of welfare state regime, employment and paid working time systems, family policies, and social norms. Using national time-use surveys for the late 1990s and early 2000s and regression techniques, the study not only finds large gender discrepancies in time use in each country at all stages of life but also determines that institutional contexts, in particular the design of family policies and employment regimes, do shape gender roles in different ways, and that Sweden displays the lowest gender gap in time allocation across the life course.

https://annesolaz.site.ined.fr/fichier/rte/31/documentsSolaz/2011AnxoetalFeminsitEconomics.pdf

Gender Differences in Time Use over the Life Course in France, Italy, Sweden, and the US

This article analyses the extent to which changes in household composition over the life course affect the gender division of labour. It identifies and analyses cross-country disparities between France, Italy, Sweden and United States, using most recent data available from the Time Use National Surveys. We focus on gender differences in the allocation of time between market work, domestic work and leisure over the life-cycle. In order to map the lifecycle, we distinguish between nine key cross-country comparable life stages according to age and family structure such as exiting parental home, union formation, parenthood, and retiring from work. By using appropriate regression techniques (Tobit with selection, Tobit and OLS), we show large discrepancies in the gender division of labour at the different life stages. This gender gap exists in all countries at any stage of the life course, but is usually smaller at the two ends of the age distribution, and larger with parenthood. Beyond social norms, the impact of parenthood on time allocation varies across countries, being smaller in those where work-family balance policies are more effective and traditionally well established.

Time Allocation between Work and Family over the Life-Cycle : A Comparative Gender Analysis of Italy, France, Sweden

In this Paper, we formulate and estimate a structural, static model of household labour supply and multiple welfare programme participation. Given the complicated nature of both the income tax schedule and the benefit rules for different welfare programmes, we use unique access to a very detailed micro-simulation model to generate accurate budget sets for each work-welfare combination. Moreover, when determining the budget sets, we use extraordinary high-quality data on earnings and other types of incomes, obtained both from employers and from income tax records. The results suggest that labour supply among two-parent families in Sweden is quite inelastic. A policy simulation designed to increase labour supply incentives for low income families generated substantial positive welfare effects, despite only minor increases in labour supply and decreases in welfare participation.

Household Labour Supply and Welfare Participation in Sweden

Work disincentive effects of taxes: An empirical analysis of Swedish men

Arbeitsangebot und Aufteilung der Hausarbeit und Kindererziehung zwischen einem Ehepaar: Vergleich zwischen Frankreich und Schweden und Zwischen Eheleuten in Frankreich und in Schweden findet generell eine traditionelle Arbeitsteilung statt, die sich in gleicher Weise entwickelt. In beiden Landern widmen die Frauen der Hausarbeit und der Kindererziehung mehr Zeit und dem Beruf weniger Zeit als die Manner. Dieses Ergebnis muss aber je nach wirtschaftlichem, institutionellen und gesellschaftlichem Kontext eines jeden Landes prazisiert werden, insbesondere um bewerten zu konnen, inwiefern solche Unterschiede eine gerechtere Aufteilung der Berufstatigkeiten und der Hausarbeit und Kindererziehung zwischen den Ehepartnern begunstigen oder behindern. Detaillierteren Analysen zufolge ist die Arbeitsteilung zwischen franzosischen Paaren weniger gerecht als zwischen schwedischen Paaren. Die schwedischen Manner widmen der Hausarbeit und der Erziehung der Kinder mehr Zeit als die Franzosen. Auserdem passen die Schwedinnen ihr Arbeitsangebot starker demjenigen ihrer Partner an. Das Vorhandensein von Kindern im Vorschulalter schrankt das Arbeitsangebot der Frauen in beiden Landern ein; die Franzosinnen neigen aber eher dazu, sich nach einer Geburt vollstandig aus der Arbeitswelt zuruckzuziehen. Zuruckzufuhren ist dieser Unterschied auf die grosere Flexibilitat des schwedischen Systems des Elternurlaubs, das mehr Moglichkeiten fur eine Wiedereingliederung in den Arbeitsmarkt bietet und dem Vorhandensein von Kleinkindern starker Rechnung tragt. Bei Kindern von uber drei Jahren begunstigt die kollektive Kinderbetreuung, von der drei Viertel der Kinder in beiden Landern betroffen sind, eine bessere Gleichstellung von Mann und Frau gegenuber dem Arbeitsangebot. Je mehr die Frauen in Frankreich arbeiten, desto gerechter ist die Aufteilung der Hausarbeit, vor allem wenn die Frauen uber ein hoheres Ausbildungsniveau verfugen. Der Beitrag der franzosischen Vater zur Kindererziehung ist jedoch geringer als derjenige der schwedischen Vater.

Lennart Flood

Papers

Gender Differences in Time Use over the Life Course in France, Italy, Sweden, and the US

Time Allocation between Work and Family over the Life-Cycle : A Comparative Gender Analysis of Italy, France, Sweden

Household Labour Supply and Welfare Participation in Sweden

Work disincentive effects of taxes: An empirical analysis of Swedish men

Offre de travail et repartition des activites domestiques et parentales au sein du couple: une comparaison entre la France et la Suede