This paper reviews Gary Becker's contributions to the economic analysis of fertility, from his 1960 paper introducing the quantity-quality tradeoff to later work linking the economics of fertility to the theory of economic growth.

Child labor is often condemned as a form of exploitation. I explore how the notion of exploitation, as used in everyday language, can be made precise in economic models of child labor. Exploitation is defined relative to a specific social welfare function. I first show that under the standard...