The twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of Gary Becker's path-breaking Treatise on the Family provides an occasion to reexamine both the American family and family economics. We begin by discussing how families have changed in recent decades: the separation of sex, marriage, and...

In this paper, we examine the determinants of decision-making power by children and young adolescents. Moving beyond previous economic models that treat children as goods consumed by adults rather than agents, we develop a noncooperative model of parental control of child behavior and child...

Does joint taxation disadvantage women? To answer that question, this paper begins by reviewing unitary and bargaining models of intrafamily allocation, and then discusses the determinants of bargaining power in a world without taxes. It argues that wage rates rather than earnings are...