Although existing organizational and cultural practices have the benefit of creating incentives to increase output, they may also create perverse incentives that have negative economic effects outside the relatively easily measured world of market outcomes.

In this paper I develop a critique of both standard neoclassical and standard Marxian conceptualizations of human capital that illustrates an important hypothesis of feminist political economy: collective conflicts based on class, gender, and age, as well as other dimensions of collective...

In this paper I argue that unequal distribution of the costs of children between men and women has been reinforced by public policies that have served the interests of men as fathers as well as the interests of those employers and taxpayers who are not also mothers. Taking an historical...

This article explores the social relations of production within the rural household of colonial New England. It draws upon a review of the litera ture as well as primary research in Western Massachusetts to describe important aspects of patriarchal domination of sons and the extent and...

Nancy Folbre challenges the conventional economist’s assumption that parents have children for the same reason that they acquire pets--primarily for the pleasure of their company. Children become the workers and taxpayers of the next generation, and "investments" in them offer a significant...