世界経済・社会統計 = World development indicators

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

Qualitative Interviewing: The Art of Hearing Data

A common approach to evaluating robustness to omitted variable bias is to observe coefficient movements after inclusion of controls. This is informative only if selection on observables is informative about selection on unobservables. Although this link is known in theory in existing literature, very few empirical articles approach this formally. I develop an extension of the theory that connects bias explicitly to coefficient stability. I show that it is necessary to take into account coefficient and R-squared movements. I develop a formal bounding argument. I show two validation exercises and discuss application to the economics literature. Supplementary materials for this article are available online.

/pdf/unobservable-selection-and-coefficient-stability-theory-and-1r9lpwnnl2.pdf

Unobservable Selection and Coefficient Stability: Theory and Evidence

The counterfactual decomposition technique popularized by Blinder (1973, Journal of Human Resources, 436–455) and Oaxaca (1973, International Economic Review, 693–709) is widely used to study mean outcome differences between groups. For example, the technique is often used to analyze wage gaps by sex or race. This article summarizes the technique and addresses several complications, such as the identification of effects of categorical predictors in the detailed decomposition or the estimation of standard errors. A new command called oaxaca is introduced, and examples illustrating its usage are given.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1536867X0800800401

The Blinder–Oaxaca decomposition for linear regression models

The Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition technique is widely used to identify and quantify the separate contributions of group differences in measurable characteristics, such as education, experience, marital status, and geographical differences to racial and gender gaps in outcomes. The technique cannot be used directly, however, if the outcome is binary and the coefficients are from a logit or probit model. I describe a relatively simple method of performing a decomposition that uses estimates from a logit or probit model. Expanding on the original application of the technique in Fairlie (1999), I provide a more thorough discussion of how to apply the technique, an analysis of the sensitivity of the decomposition estimates to different parameters, and the calculation of standard errors.

An Extension of the Blinder-Oaxaca Decomposition Technique to Logit and Probit Models

The Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition technique is widely used to identify and quantify the separate contributions of group differences in measurable characteristics, such as education, experience, marital status, and geographical differences to racial and gender gaps in outcomes. The technique cannot be used directly, however, if the outcome is binary and the coefficients are from a logit or probit model. I describe a relatively simple method of performing a decomposition that uses estimates from a logit or probit model. Expanding on the original application of the technique in Fairlie [3], I provide a more thorough discussion of how to apply the technique, an analysis of the sensitivity of the decomposition estimates to different parameters, and the calculation of standard errors. I also compare the estimates to Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition estimates and discuss an example of when the Blinder-Oaxaca technique may be problematic.

/pdf/an-extension-of-the-blinder-oaxaca-decomposition-technique-3t2svzz1a2.pdf

Estimates from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) indicate that African-American men are one-third as likely to be entrepreneurs as white men. The large discrepancy is due to a black transition rate into self-employed business ownership that is approximately one half the white rate and a black transition rate out of self-employed business ownership that is twice the white rate. Using a new variation of the Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition technique, I find that racial differences in asset levels and probabilities of having self-employed fathers explain a large part of the black/white gap in the entry rate, but almost none of the gap in the exit rate.

/pdf/the-absence-of-the-african-american-owned-business-an-5026nmi7nt.pdf

The Absence of the African-American Owned Business: An Analysis of the Dynamics of Self-Employment

Using confidential microdata from the U.S. Census Bureau, we investigate the performance of female-owned businesses making comparisons to male-owned businesses. Using regression estimates and a decomposition technique, we explore the role that human capital, especially through prior work experience, and financial capital play in contributing to why female-owned businesses have lower survival rates, profits, employment and sales. We find that female-owned businesses are less successful than male-owned businesses because they have less startup capital, and business human capital acquired through prior work experience in a similar business and prior work experience in family business. We also find some evidence that female-owned businesses work fewer hours and may have different preferences for the goals of their business.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm?abstractid=1278918

Gender Differences in Business Performance: Evidence from the Characteristics of Business Owners Survey

Estimates from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics indicate that African‐American men are one‐third as likely to be self‐employed as white men. The large discrepancy is due to a black transition rate into self‐employment that is approximately one‐half the white rate and a black transition rate out of self‐employment that is twice the white rate. Using a new variation of the Blinder‐Oaxaca decomposition technique, I find that racial differences in asset levels and probabilities of having self‐employed fathers explain a large part of the gap in the entry rate, but almost none of the gap in the exit rate.

/pdf/the-absence-of-the-african-american-owned-business-an-71e6if4jrx.pdf

Robert W. Fairlie

Papers

An Extension of the Blinder-Oaxaca Decomposition Technique to Logit and Probit Models

An Extension of the Blinder-Oaxaca Decomposition Technique to Logit and Probit Models

The Absence of the African-American Owned Business: An Analysis of the Dynamics of Self-Employment

Gender Differences in Business Performance: Evidence from the Characteristics of Business Owners Survey

The Absence of the African‐American Owned Business: An Analysis of the Dynamics of Self‐Employment