Gary Becker's path-breaking Treatise on the Family (1981) subjected individuals' decisions about sex, marriage, childbearing, and childrearing to rational choice analysis. The American family has changed radically in recent decades; we survey these changes as well as the ongoing effort to...

The standard economic model of the family is a 'common preference' model that assumes that a family maximizes a single utility function and implies that family behavior is independent of which individuals receive income or control resources. In recent years, this model has been challenged by...