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

http://www.ced.berkeley.edu/downloads/research/LUP.parks.pdf

Urban green space, public health, and environmental justice: The challenge of making cities ‘just green enough’

The Rise of the Creative Class

Using Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) microdata over the 1980-2010 period, we provide new empirical evidence on the extent of and trends in the gender wage gap, which declined considerably during this time. By 2010, conventional human capital variables taken together explained little of the gender wage gap, while gender differences in occupation and industry continued to be important. Moreover, the gender pay gap declined much more slowly at the top of the wage distribution than at the middle or bottom and by 2010 was noticeably higher at the top. We then survey the literature to identify what has been learned about the explanations for the gap. We conclude that many of the traditional explanations continue to have salience. Although human-capital factors are now relatively unimportant in the aggregate, women's work force interruptions and shorter hours remain significant in high-skilled occupations, possibly due to compensating differentials. Gender differences in occupations and industries, as well as differences in gender roles and the gender division of labor remain important, and research based on experimental evidence strongly suggests that discrimination cannot be discounted. Psychological attributes or noncognitive skills comprise one of the newer explanations for gender differences in outcomes. Our effort to assess the quantitative evidence on the importance of these factors suggests that they account for a small to moderate portion of the gender pay gap, considerably smaller than, say, occupation and industry effects, though they appear to modestly contribute to these differences.

/pdf/the-gender-wage-gap-extent-trends-and-explanations-3m2c5a7dft.pdf

The Gender Wage Gap: Extent, Trends, and Explanations

Using PSID microdata over the 1980-2010, we provide new empirical evidence on the extent of and trends in the gender wage gap, which declined considerably over this period. By 2010, conventional human capital variables taken together explained little of the gender wage gap, while gender differences in occupation and industry continued to be important. Moreover, the gender pay gap declined much more slowly at the top of the wage distribution that at the middle or the bottom and by 2010 was noticeably higher at the top. We then survey the literature to identify what has been learned about the explanations for the gap. We conclude that many of the traditional explanations continue to have salience. Although human capital factors are now relatively unimportant in the aggregate, women’s work force interruptions and shorter hours remain significant in high skilled occupations, possibly due to compensating differentials. Gender differences in occupations and industries, as well as differences in gender roles and the gender division of labor remain important, and research based on experimental evidence strongly suggests that discrimination cannot be discounted. Psychological attributes or noncognitive skills comprise one of the newer explanations for gender differences in outcomes. Our effort to assess the quantitative evidence on the importance of these factors suggests that they account for a small to moderate portion of the gender pay gap, considerably smaller than say occupation and industry effects, though they appear to modestly contribute to these differences.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/dp9656.pdf?abstractid=2716597&mirid=1

This review traces the evolution of family migration research from one that was very narrowly focused on the trailing wife effect, to a transdisciplinary research topic which has the potential to greatly improve our understanding of family dynamics, life course events, family well-being, gender differences in employment and earnings, and most importantly, migration research. The emerging scholarship surrounding family migration suggests that, firstly, family migration is extremely complicated and moves well beyond any conceptualisation that is brought to bear on individual migration, and secondly, a great deal of what has been traditionally thought of as individual migration should be more appropriately conceived of as family migration. The implication, of course, is that internal migration research should embrace the family as a central component of migration, or rather that family migration should move front and centre in discussions regarding migration in general. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Migration in a family way

In this paper we consider the effects of family migration on women’s employment status, using census microdata from Great Britain and the United States. We test a simple hypothesis that families tend to move long distances in favor of the male’s career and that this can have a detrimental effect on women’s employment status. Unlike many previous studies of this question, our work emphasizes the importance of identifying couples that have migrated together, rather than simply comparing long-distance (fe)male migrants with nonmigrant (fe)males individually. We demonstrate that women’s employment status is harmed by family migration; the results we present are surprisingly consistent for Great Britain and the United States, despite differing economic situations and cultural norms regarding gender and migration. We also demonstrate that studies that fail to identify linked migrant couples are likely to underestimate the negative effects of family migration on women’s employment status.

/pdf/a-cross-national-comparison-of-the-impact-of-family-2fxrzxf1n0.pdf

A cross-national comparison of the impact of family migration on women's employment status.

This article focuses primarily on determining the economic consequences of family migration for husbands and wives in matched married-couple families, using data from waves 1 and 2 of the National Survey of Families and Households. The analysis is designed to determine whether or not the return to migration for husbands and wives is similarly affected by their relative earning potential, as predicted by the human-capital model of migration. The study's secondary contributions include its estimation of the effect of moving on earnings for both husbands and wives within matched married-couple families and its avoidance of the problems of self-selection bias and unobserved variable bias associated with cross-sectional models by using panel-data methods. The results indicate—as predicted by the gender-role model of family migration—that the effect of family migration on individual earnings is largely a function of gender: family migration causes an increase in the husband's income and no change in th...

Family Migration and the Relative Earnings of Husbands and Wives

Americans have always been viewed, both by themselves and by others, as a migrant society. However, migration rates have reached record lows: only 1.6% of Americans moved from one state to another in 2009, and only 3.7% moved from one county to another. This research conducts a decomposition of the change in migration rates between 1999 and 2009 using data from the Current Population Survey. The analysis concludes that about 63% of the decline in migration rates between 1999 and 2009 can be attributed to the direct effects of the economic crisis that began in 2007, and another 17% of the decline can be attributed to demographic changes (e.g. the aging of the population) but that the remaining 20% of the decrease in migration is due to a decline in migration behaviour, or increased rootedness, that applies to all demographic categories. The discussion focuses on the implications of the universal, or secular, rise in rootedness for migration studies. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

It is not Just the Economy: Declining Migration and the Rise of Secular Rootedness

This paper examines the effect of migration and residential mobility on union dissolution among married and cohabiting couples. Moving is a stressful life event, and a large, multidisciplinary literature has shown that family migration often benefits one partner (usually the man) more than the other. Even so, no study to date has examined the possible impact of within-nation geographical mobility on union dissolution. We base our longitudinal analysis on retrospective event-history data from Austria. Our results show that couples who move frequently have a significantly higher risk of union dissolution, and we suggest a variety of mechanisms that may explain this.

/pdf/moving-and-union-dissolution-4urt01nhw3.pdf

Thomas J. Cooke

Papers

Migration in a family way

A cross-national comparison of the impact of family migration on women's employment status.

Family Migration and the Relative Earnings of Husbands and Wives

It is not Just the Economy: Declining Migration and the Rise of Secular Rootedness

Moving and Union Dissolution