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

We investigate conditions sufficient for identification of average treatment effects using instrumental variables. First we show that the existence of valid instruments is not sufficient to identify any meaningful average treatment effect. We then establish that the combination of an instrument and a condition on the relation between the instrument and the participation status is sufficient for identification of a local average treatment effect for those who can be induced to change their participation status by changing the value of the instrument. Finally we derive the probability limit of the standard IV estimator under these conditions. It is seen to be a weighted average of local average treatment effects.

Evolution and Rationality Some Recent Game-Theoretic Results. Identification and Estimation of Local Average Treatment Effects

While the precise causes of postwar trade growth are not well understood, declines in transport costs top the lists of usual suspects. However, there is remarkably little systematic evidence documenting the decline. This paper brings to bear an eclectic mix of data in order to provide a detailed accounting of the time-series pattern of shipping costs. The ad-valorem impact of ocean shipping costs is not much lower today than in the 1950s, with technological advances largely trumped by adverse cost shocks. In contrast, air shipping costs have dropped an order of magnitude, and airborne trade has grown rapidly as a result. As a result, international trade has also experienced a significant rise in speed.

https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/jep.21.3.131

Transportation Costs and International Trade in the Second Era of Globalization

This book explores whether the world economy is breaking up into regional trading and currency blocs centred on the European Community, Japan and the United States. Frankel uses trade, investment and financial data to assess this issue. He concludes with an analysis of how trends in regional economic integration can be used as building blocks for a stronger multilateral system.

Regional Trading Blocs in the world economic system, reseñado por Antonio Ortiz-Mena L.N.

One of the best-established empirical results in international economics is that bilateral trade decreases with distance. Although well known, this result has not been systematically analyzed before. We examine 1,467 distance effects estimated in 103 papers. Information collected on each estimate allows us to test hypotheses about the causes of variation in the estimates. Our most interesting finding is that the estimated negative impact of distance on trade rose around the middle of the century and has remained persistently high since then. This result holds even after controlling for many important differences in samples and methods.

/pdf/the-puzzling-persistence-of-the-distance-effect-on-bilateral-4t98kgjkud.pdf

The Puzzling Persistence of the Distance Effect on Bilateral Trade

The volume of world trade has grown more than twice as fast as real world income since 1980. Surprisingly, the effect of distance on trade has increased during this period. It could be that countries are trading greater volumes of goods that are highly sensitive to distance. An alternative explanation is that distance has become more import for a significant share of goods. Using highly disaggregated bilateral trade data, Berthelon and Freund find that adjustment in the composition of trade has not influenced the way in which distance affects trade. In contrast, for about 25 percent of industries, distance has become more important. This implies that the increased distance sensitivity of trade is a result of a change in relative trade costs that affects many industries, as opposed to a shift to more distance-sensitive products. The authors also find that homogeneous products are twice as likely to have become more distance sensitive as compared with differentiated goods. This is consistent with the hypothesis that falling search costs, resulting from improvements in transport and communications, are relatively more important for differentiated goods. The results offer no evidence of the "death of distance." Rather, they suggest that distance-related relative trade costs have remained unchanged or shifted in favor of proximate markets. This paper - a product of Trade, Development Research Group - is part of a larger effort in the group to understand the effect of technology on trade.

On the Conservation of Distance in International Trade

https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/bitstream/handle/10986/13888/wps3293conservation.pdf?sequence=1

Risky behavior among youth: Incapacitation effects of school on adolescent motherhood and crime in Chile

This paper develops and estimates a simple structural model of household decisions regarding child labor and schooling. We argue that part of the conflicting results from the previous literature - related to the effect of improvements in economic conditions on child labor - derives from the different income and substitution effects implicit in different types of income variation. Our model leads to an empirical specification where income and substitution effects can be clearly identified. We apply our model to Brazil and use agricultural shocks to local economic activity (coffee and overall agricultural production) to distinguish between the effects of increases in household income and increases in the opportunity cost of children's time. The results show that higher parental wages and household wealth are associated with lower child labor and higher school attendance. Nevertheless, conditional on family income and socioeconomic status, exogenous temporary increases in local economic activity are associated with increased opportunity cost of children's time and, therefore, higher child labor and lower schooling. The results reconcile economic theory with seemingly contradictory evidence from the previous empirical literature.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/SSRN_ID960949_code424424.pdf?abstractid=960949&mirid=4

Household Choices of Child Labor and Schooling: A Simple Model With Application to Brazil

During the 1990’s the world experienced a new wave of regional integration agreements (RIAs) that reached unprecedented proportions. In the presence of economies of scale or extent-of-the market effects RIAs may have positive growth effects. I introduce a new measure of regional integration by interacting country membership to a RIA and the partners’ share of world GDP, which allows capturing differentiated effects depending on the size of the partners. Results indicate that RIAs have exerted positive effects on growth. In addition, I find that North-North agreements have significant growth effects; South-South agreements have ambiguous effects depending on the size of the countries joining them, and that there is no clear answer for North-South agreements.

Matias Berthelon

Papers

On the Conservation of Distance in International Trade

On the Conservation of Distance in International Trade

Risky behavior among youth: Incapacitation effects of school on adolescent motherhood and crime in Chile

Household Choices of Child Labor and Schooling: A Simple Model With Application to Brazil

Growth Effects of Regional Integration Agreements