Major innovations and extensions require that economists change their focus. This entails the destruction of some of their human capital. Even though this is a process of creative destruction, typical of progress in industry, the process is somewhat painful and therefore is not undertaken...

When Jacob Mincer and Gary Becker started the New Home Economics (NHE) at Columbia University in the early 1960s, they expanded on the field of family and consumption economics that Hazel Kirk and Margaret Reid began in the early 1920s. This paper studies forty years of household economics, the...

This paper explains why marriage market conditions may affect the participation of women in the labor force. In particular, it is claimed that changes in cohort size affect marriage market conditions and therefore women's labor-force participation. The paper also indicates how a theory of labor...