Family economy

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The family economics is a special field of financial theory . While household theory also includes so-called institutional households in addition to families in the traditional sense, ie communities without the purpose of making a profit, family economics considers the actions of individuals under the aspect of maximizing utility within a family. In family economics, economic concepts are applied to the family, for example division of labor and incentives , production and maximizing utility . The pioneer of this research branch was Gary Becker , who was responsible for this work in 1992Alfred Nobel Memorial Prize for Economics .

history

The family appears for the first time in Adam Smith's economics . In his work The Wealth of Nations it says: “A person must always live from his work and his wages must at least be sufficient to provide him with a livelihood. In most cases it has to be a little higher; otherwise the worker would not be able to found a family and the sex of such workers would die out with the first generation. ”The family also played a role with Thomas Robert Malthus : He argued that families with higher incomes would have more children and so on caused population growth, which led to a drop in wages.

In the 1960s, Gary Becker and Jacob Mincer developed the so-called "New Home Economics". In the first publications, Becker examined the number of children, Mincer the labor supply of women and Becker the use of time in the household.

State of research

In recent years, according to Jeremy Greenwood, Nezih Guner and Guillaume Vandenbroucke, family economics has primarily dealt with six changes in the family over the past century:

  • A clear drop in the number of children per family on the one hand, and an increase in investments in individual children on the other
  • An increase in the labor force participation of married women
  • A decrease in marriages
  • A greater degree of associative pairing
  • More children raised by single parents
  • Changes in social norms regarding sex outside of marriage and the role of married women in the workplace

Partner choice

In recent years, the extent of associative pairing has increased in many countries around the world : people look for partners with a similar education and a similar social background. This trend is held responsible for the fact that economic inequality of households is growing within many countries.

Family decisions

The family is modeled differently in economic models. It is often seen as an economic entity as a whole. Gary Becker argues that individual decision-makers in the household also think altruistically of the other household members. More recently, however, it has become fashionable to accept negotiations within the family - for example Amartya Sen did

Division of labor in the family

The division of labor - for example between housework and gainful employment - is usually considered to increase prosperity in the neoclassical economy. Gary Becker assumed that women have a comparative advantage for housework - so it is advantageous for both spouses if the woman concentrates on the household and the man on gainful employment. However, the work can also be divided differently. The decision is repeatedly modeled as a negotiation within the family. Kaushik Basu has set up a model in which the bargaining power within the family depends on the individual utility-maximizing functions, with the potentially better-earning partner having more bargaining power. The results of the negotiations have an impact on further bargaining power within the family.

In the 19th and 20th centuries, the participation of women in the labor force increased significantly. Jeremy Greenwood, Ananth Seshadri and Mehmet Yorukoglu argue that this was due to the introduction of household appliances that made housework more time-saving.

raising children

Regarding child-rearing, Matthias Doepke and Fabrizio Zilibotti found in an empirical study that parents spend more time on child-rearing, the higher the economic inequality in a country.

literature

  • Jeremy Greenwood, Nezih Guner and Guillaume Vandenbroucke: " Family Economics Writ Large ". Journal of Economic Literature, 55 (4): 1346-434, 2017.
  • Martin Browning, Pierre-André Chiappori, Yoram Weiss: Family Economics (PDF; 3.3 MB). January 2011.
  • Gary S. Becker: A Treatise on the Family, Harvard University Press 1981, ISBN 978-0-674-90696-9 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Michèle Tertilt - Family Economics (DE). Retrieved March 18, 2019 .
  2. ↑ Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations . RL Prager, Berlin 1905, p. 94 .
  3. ^ Thomas Malthus: An Essay on the Principle of Population. 1798, Retrieved March 18, 2019 .
  4. ↑ Shoshana Grossbard: The New Home Economics at Columbia and Chicago . In: Shoshana Grossbard (Ed.): Jacob Mincer: A Pioneer of Modern Labor Economics . Springer, New York 2006.
  5. ^ Gary Becker: An Economic Analysis of Fertility . In: NBER (Ed.): Demographic and Economic Change in Developed Countries, a Converence of the Universities . Princeton University Press, 1960.
  6. ^ Jacob Mincer: Labor Force Participation of Married Women: a Study of Labor Supply . In: H. Gregg Lewis (Ed.): Aspects of Labor Economics . Princeton University Press, 1962.
  7. ^ Gary Becker: A Theory of the Allocation of Time. In: The Economic Journal. September 1, 1965, accessed March 18, 2019 .
  8. ↑ Jeremy Greenwood, Nezih Guner and Guillaume Vandenbroucke: Family Economics Writ Large . In: Journal of Economic Literature . tape 55 , no. 4 , 2017, p. 1346–1434 , doi : 10.1257 / jel.20161287 .
  9. ↑ Marital choices are exacerbating household income inequality . In: The Economist . September 21, 2017, ISSN  0013-0613 ( economist.com [accessed March 24, 2019]).
  10. ↑ Jeremy Greenwood, Nezih Guner, Georgi Kocharkov, Cezar Santos: Marry Your Like: Assortative Mating and Income Inequality . In: American Economic Review . tape 104 , no. 5 , May 2014, ISSN  0002-8282 , p. 348-353 , doi : 10.1257 / aer.104.5.348 .
  11. ^ Gary S. Becker: Altruism in the Family and Selfishness in the Market Place . In: Economica . tape 48 , no. 189 , 1981, ISSN  0013-0427 , pp. 1-15 , doi : 10.2307 / 2552939 , JSTOR : 2552939 .
  12. ↑ Amartya Sen: Gender and Cooperative Conflicts . In: Irene Tinker (Ed.): Persistent Inequalities . Oxford University Press, 1990.
  13. ^ Gary Becker: A Treatise on the Family . Harvard University Press, 1981, ISBN 0-674-90699-3 .
  14. ^ Kaushik Basu : Gender and Say: A Model of Household Behavior with Endogenously Determined Balance of Power . In: The Economic Journal . tape 116 , no. 511 , April 2006, p. 558-580 , doi : 10.1111 / j.1468-0297.2006.01092.x .
  15. ↑ Jeremy Greenwood, Ananth Seshadri and Mehmet Yorukoglu: Engines of Liberation . In: The Review of Economic Studies . tape 72 , no. 1 , 2005, p. 109-133 , doi : 10.1111 / 0034-6527.00326 .
  16. ↑ Matthias Doepke and Fabrizio Zilibotti: Love, Money, and Parenting . Princeton University Press, 2018.