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

Men and Women of the Corporation

Survey research finds that mothers suffer a substantial wage penalty, although the causal mechanism producing it remains elusive. The authors employed a laboratory experiment to evaluate the hypothesis that status-based discrimination plays an important role and an audit study of actual employers to assess its real-world implications. In both studies, participants evaluated application materials for a pair of same-gender equally qualified job candidates who differed on parental status. The laboratory experiment found that mothers were penalized on a host of measures, including perceived competence and recommended starting salary. Men were not penalized for, and sometimes benefited from, being a parent. The audit study showed that actual employers discriminate against mothers, but not against fathers.

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Getting a Job : Is There a Motherhood Penalty?

The converging roles of men and women are among the grandest advances in society and the economy in the last century. These aspects of the grand gender convergence are figurative chapters in a history of gender roles. But what must the “last” chapter contain for there to be equality in the labor market? The answer may come as a surprise. The solution does not (necessarily) have to involve government intervention and it need not make men more responsible in the home (although that wouldn't hurt). But it must involve changes in the labor market, especially how jobs are structured and remunerated to enhance temporal flexibility. The gender gap in pay would be considerably reduced and might vanish altogether if firms did not have an incentive to disproportionately reward individuals who labored long hours and worked particular hours. Such change has taken off in various sectors, such as technology, science, and health, but is less apparent in the corporate, financial, and legal worlds. (JEL J3, J16, ...

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A Grand Gender Convergence: Its Last Chapter

Motherhood is associated with lower hourly pay, but the causes of this are not well understood Mothers may earn less than other women because having children causes them to (1) lose job experience, (2) be less productive at work, (3) trade off higher wages for mother-friendly jobs, or (4) be discriminated against by employers Or the relationship may be spurious rather than causal-women with lower earning potential may have children at relatively higher rates The authors use data from the 1982-1993 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth with fixed-effects models to examine the wage penalty for motherhood Results show a wage penalty of 7 percent per child Penalties are larger for married women than for unmarried women Women with (more) children have fewer years of job experience, and after controlling for experience a penalty of 5 percent per child remains "Mother-friendly" characteristics of the jobs held by mothers explain little of the penalty beyond the tendency of more mothers than non-mothers to work part-time The portion of the motherhood penalty unexplained probably results from the effect of motherhood on productivity and/or from discrimination by employers against mothers While the benefits of mothering diffuse widely-to the employers, neighbors, friends, spouses, and children of the adults who received the mothering-the costs of child rearing are borne disproportionately by mothers

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The Wage Penalty for Motherhood

We examine the relative pay of occupations involving care, such as teaching, counseling, providing health services, or supervising children. We use panel data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth covering workers between 17 and 35 years of age. Care work pays less than other occupations after controlling for the education and employment experience of the workers, many occupation and industry characteristics, and (via individual fixed effects) unmeasured, stable characteristics of those who hold the jobs. Both men and women in care work pay this relative wage penalty. However, more women than men pay the penalty, since more women than men do this kind of work.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/sp.2002.49.4.455

Wages of Virtue: The Relative Pay of Care Work

Wages of Virtue: The Relative Pay of Care Work (WP-02-07)

Mothers’ employment and earnings partly depend on social policies and cultural norms supporting women’s paid and unpaid work. Previous research suggests that work–family policies are deeply shaped by their cultural context. We examine country variation in the associations between motherhood and earnings, in cultural attitudes surrounding women’s employment, and in child-care and parental leave policies. We model how cultural attitudes moderate the impact of policies on women’s earnings across countries. Parental leaves and public childcare are associated with higher earnings for mothers when cultural support for maternal employment is high, but have less positive or even negative relationships with earnings where cultural attitudes support the male breadwinner/female caregiver model.

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The Motherhood Penalty in Cross-National Perspective: The Importance of Work–Family Policies and Cultural Attitudes

Earnings inequality has grown in recent decades in the United States, yet research investigating the motherhood wage penalty has not fully considered how the penalty itself, and the mechanisms prod...

Michelle J. Budig

Papers

The Wage Penalty for Motherhood

Wages of Virtue: The Relative Pay of Care Work

Wages of Virtue: The Relative Pay of Care Work (WP-02-07)

The Motherhood Penalty in Cross-National Perspective: The Importance of Work–Family Policies and Cultural Attitudes

Differences in Disadvantage: Variation in the Motherhood Penalty across White Women’s Earnings Distribution