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 role of improved schooling, a central part of most development strategies, has become controversial because expansion of school attainment has not guaranteed improved economic conditions. This paper reviews the role of cognitive skills in promoting economic well-being, with a particular focus on the role of school quality and quantity. It concludes that there is strong evidence that the cognitive skills of the population – rather than mere school attainment – are powerfully related to individual earnings, to the distribution of income, and to economic growth. New empirical results show the importance of both minimal and high level skills, the complementarity of skills and quality of economic institutions, and robustness of the relationship between skills and growth. International comparisons incorporating expanded data on cognitive skills reveal much larger skill deficits in developing countries than generally derived from just school enrollment and attainment. The magnitude of change needed makes clear that closing the economic gap with developed countries will require major structural changes in schooling institutions.

The role of cognitive skills in economic development

The role of improved schooling, a central part of most development strategies, has become controversial because expansion of school attainment has not guaranteed improved economic conditions. This paper reviews the role of cognitive skills in pro- moting economic well-being, with a particular focus on the role of school quality and quantity. It concludes that there is strong evidence that the cognitive skills of the population—rather than mere school attainment—are powerfully related to indi- vidual earnings, to the distribution of income, and to economic growth. New empiri- cal results show the importance of both minimal and high level skills, the comple- mentarity of skills and the quality of economic institutions, and the robustness of the relationship between skills and growth. International comparisons incorporating expanded data on cognitive skills reveal much larger skill deficits in developing coun - tries than generally derived from just school enrollment and attainment. The mag- nitude of change needed makes clear that closing the economic gap with developed countries will require major structural changes in schooling institutions.

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The Role of Cognitive Skills in Economic Development

The Statistics of Canada

When politicians point to the high social costs and taxpayer burden imposed by disintegrating `family values they overlook the fact that individuals do not simply make the decisions that lead to unwed parenthood marriage or divorce on the basis of what is good for society. They weigh the costs and benefits of each of these choices to themselves--and sometimes their children. But how much do individuals know about these costs and benefits? I think that we as demographers have something to contribute here. As individual researchers we investigate the relationship between marriage and longevity wealth earnings or childrens achievements but we rarely try to pull all this evidence together. I would like to argue that we have an opportunity and an obligation to do that and to tell people what their decisions about marriage and family potentially mean for them as individuals. That is my objective here. (EXCERPT)

Does Marriage Matter

Using three waves (1982, 1986, 1990) of the National Graduate Survey (NGS) we analyze the time it takes graduates of Canadian universities to start a full time job that lasts six months or more. We analyze duration to first job using the Cox proportional hazards model. Our results suggest large differences in the speed of the transition to work both within and between cohorts. They also suggest that the differences in duration to first job across NGS cohorts are not just driven by differences in business cycle conditions at the time of graduation. Over certain segments of duration the patterns of job-starting are similar across cohorts. Within cohorts the differences in the school-to-work transition across certain demographic groups are small, and for some the differences remain stable across cohorts.

The Transition to Work for Canadian University Graduates: Time to First Job, 1982-1990

The current move toward a 'knowledge-based economy' implies a greater dependence on state-of-the-art technology. If Canada is to remain at the forefront of critical technologies, which depend largely on the efforts of engineers, there will have to be substantial growth in the number of engineers working in this country. Attracting more women into engineering programs, where they are still greatly underrepresented, could constitute an important source of these needed professionals. In this report, data on three cohorts of recent graduates are used to investigate whether unsatisfactory labour market outcomes are a significant factor behind women's under- representation in engineering programs. Generally, the results indicate that female engineers do relatively well in the labour market— especially compared with women in other fields of study.

Women in engineering: The missing link in the Canadian knowledge economy Articles

A Recursive Earnings-Generation Model for Canadian Males

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Post-Schooling Outcomes of University Graduates: A Tax Data Linkage Approach

This research exploits the unique qualities of a Canadian longitudinal tax-based datafile (the “LAD”) to present new empirical evidence on the effects of marriage and childbearing on women’s earnings. It differs from earlier research, first, by following a cohort of young women from their late teens through their early forties and controlling for the unobserved heterogeneity across those who marry and/or have children and those who remain unattached by conditioning the analysis on completed marriage-fertility profiles. The approach then consists of estimating separate earnings equations for each marriage-childbearing group which allow shifts in the underlying age-earnings profiles at the point of marriage or childbirth within each group. The approach also allows the effects of marriage and childbearing to evolve over time, thus capturing the effects after one year, after two years, and so on, these profiles of the relevant earnings effects replacing the single parameter(s) for being married and/or having children present typically found in the literature. Marriage effects are separated from the effects of having children, and these latter are broken down by the number of children the woman has and the birth order of the child. The results indicate that i) marriage per se seems to have relatively little effect on women’s earnings, ii) women who marry generally have moderately higher earnings than those who remain single until they begin to have children, iii) married women’s earnings decrease significantly with the birth of each child and then recover to decreasing degrees with each additional child the woman has (even though pre-marriage earnings levels are relatively similar across all the married groups), iv) these effects differ to some degree for women in common law relationships, v) single mothers who have just one child have somewhat lower earnings than others before they have their child, but then fall behind and recover only partly over time, while lone mothers who have two children are characterised by low earnings throughout their careers and quite flat earnings trajectories after the sharp declines that occur with the birth of the first child, vi) these patterns are surprisingly similar for women with and without university degrees, and even more alike for those who have their children at a younger versus older age.

Ross Finnie

Papers

The Transition to Work for Canadian University Graduates: Time to First Job, 1982-1990

Women in engineering: The missing link in the Canadian knowledge economy Articles

A Recursive Earnings-Generation Model for Canadian Males

Post-Schooling Outcomes of University Graduates: A Tax Data Linkage Approach

Marriage, child-bearing and women's earnings: evidence based on complete longitudinal profiles