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

Combining forecasts: A review and annotated bibliography

Time series methods are used to make long-run forecasts, with confidence intervals, of age-specific mortality in the United States from 1990 to 2065. First, the logs of the age-specific death rates are modeled as a linear function of an unobserved period-specific intensity index, with parameters depending on age. This model is fit to the matrix of U.S. death rates, 1933 to 1987, using the singular value decomposition (SVD) method; it accounts for almost all the variance over time in age-specific death rates as a group. Whereas e 0 has risen at a decreasing rate over the century and has decreasing variability, k(t) declines at a roughly constant rate and has roughly constant variability, facilitating forecasting. k(t), which indexes the intensity of mortality, is next modeled as a time series (specifically, a random walk with drift) and forecast. The method performs very well on within-sample forecasts, and the forecasts are insensitive to reductions in the length of the base period from 90 to 30 ...

https://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~dbackus/BCH/demography/LeeCarter_JASA_92.pdf

Modeling and forecasting U. S. mortality

Description Contents Resources Courses About the Authors
In the last few decades exchange rate economics has seen a number of developments, with substantial contributions to both the theory and empirics of exchange rate determination. Important developments in econometrics and the increasingly large availability of high-quality data have also been responsible for stimulating the large amount of empirical work on exchange rates in this period. Nonetheless, while our understanding of exchange rates has significantly improved, a number of challenges and open questions remain in the exchange rate debate, enhanced by events including the launch of the Euro and the large number of recent currency crises. This volume provides a selective coverage of the literature on exchange rates, focusing on developments from within the last fifteen years. Clear explanations of theories are offered, alongside an appraisal of the literature and suggestions for further research and analysis.

/pdf/the-economics-of-exchange-rates-4dibxw8chp.pdf

The Economics of Exchange Rates

Using annual data spanning two centuries for dollar-sterling and franc-sterling real exchange rates, we find strong evidence of mean-reverting real exchange rate behavior. Using simple, stationary, autoregressive models estimated on prefloat data, we easily outperform nonstationary real exchange rate models in dynamic forecasting exercises over the recent float. Such stationary univariate equations explain 60-80 percent of the in-sample variation in real exchange rates, although the degree of short-run persistence may be high. The econometric estimates imply a half-life of shocks to the real exchange rate of about 6 years for dollar-sterling and a little under 3 years for franc-sterling.

https://www.eco.uc3m.es/~jgonzalo/teaching/AppliedEconomics/lothiantaylor.pdf

Real Exchange Rate Behavior: The Recent Float from the Perspective of the Past Two Centuries

We propose a bootstrap autoregressive-distributed lag (ARDL) test. By applying the appropriate bootstrap method, some weaknesses underlying the Pesaran, Shin and Smith ARDL bounds test are addresse...

Bootstrapping the autoregressive distributed lag test for cointegration

The post-World War II increase in the size of the federal government has led to a number of theoretical and empirical investigations of the sources of this growth. In particular, economists have questioned whether increases in the size of the federal budget tend to be initiated by changes in expenditures followed by revenue adjustments, by the reverse sequence, or both. Friedman, for example, argues that governments adjust expenditures to the level of revenues, so that control of taxation is essential to limit growth in government [13]. Alternatively, the spend-and-tax model posits that revenues will be adjusted to finance any politically chosen level of expenditures. A third perspective, reflecting the institutional separation of allocation and taxation functions of the federal government, hypothesizes the independent determination of revenues and expenditures. The goal of this investigation is to test these three alternative theories of the budgetary process for the United States.

Do Revenues or Expenditures Respond to Budgetary Disequilibria

National price levels, purchasing power parity, and cointegration: a test of four high inflation economies

Simulations demonstrate that when unit-root behavior is rejected in a Levin and Lin panel test, it is incorrect to infer that all series are stationary. Recent tests proposed by Im, Pesaran and Shin, and by Sarno and Taylor, are also incapable of determining the mix of I(0) and I(1) series in a panel setting. This paper introduces a new unit-root test that allows the researcher to discern which series are I(0) and which ones are I(1). The test has double to triple the power of single-equation augmented Dickey–Fuller tests.

Misleading Inferences from Panel Unit‐Root Tests with an Illustration from Purchasing Power Parity

A unit root testing procedure is presented that exploits the well-established power advantages of panel estimation while rectifying a deficiency in other panel unit root tests. This test (called SURADF) is based on seemingly unrelated regressions applied to Augmented Dickey-Fuller (ADF) tests for a unit root. In contrast to extant panel unit root tests, our test allows for determination of which members of the panel reject the null hypothesis of a unit root and which ones do not. The power of the test is investigated with Monte Carlo simulation and demonstrated with application to several panels of real exchange rates. We find that when the contemporaneous cross-correlations of the residuals are high, our procedure has substantially more power to reject a unit root than the single equation Dickey-Fuller test. Copyright 2002 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Robert McNown

Papers

Bootstrapping the autoregressive distributed lag test for cointegration

Do Revenues or Expenditures Respond to Budgetary Disequilibria

National price levels, purchasing power parity, and cointegration: a test of four high inflation economies

Misleading Inferences from Panel Unit‐Root Tests with an Illustration from Purchasing Power Parity

Series-specific Unit Root Tests with Panel Data*