Our model of growth departs from both the Malthusian and neoclassical approaches by including investments in human capital. We assume, crucially, that rates of return on human capital investments rise, rather than, decline, as the stock of human capital increases, until the stock becomes large....

In a series of lectures delivered in 1979 at the Collège de France under the title The Birth of Biopolitics, Michel Foucault conducted a close reading of Gary Becker’s writings on human capital and on crime and punishment, within the context of an elaboration and critique of American...

The Federal Communications Commission’s proposed net neutrality rules would, among other things, prohibit broadband access providers from prioritizing traffic, charging differential prices based on the priority status, imposing congestion-related charges, and adopting business models that...

This paper brings together and integrates social interactions and the special relation between quantity and quality. We are able to show that the observed quality income elasticity would be relatively high and the quantity elasticity relatively low and sometimes negative, even if the true...

Gary S. Becker, the 1992 recipient of the Nobel Prize for Economic Science and Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago, spoke to business and community leaders as guest lecturer in the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond's Economic Lecture Series. This article is excerpted from The...

This paper concentrates on both the positive and normative effects of punishments that enforce laws to make production and consumption of particular goods illegal, with illegal drugs as the main example. Optimal public expenditures on apprehension and conviction of illegal suppliers obviously...

We use a framework suggested by a model of rational addiction to analyze empirically the demand for cigarettes. The data consist of per capita cigarettes sales (in packs) annually by state for the period 1955 through 1985. The empirical results provide support for the implications of a rational...

This paper focuses on the causes of divorce. Section I developsa theoretical analysis of marital dissolution incorporating uncertaintyabout the outcomes of marital decisions into a framework of utilitymaximization and the marriage market. Section II explores the implica-tions of the theoretical...

This paper analyzes the savings and health care impacts of mortality contingent claims, defined here as income measures, such as annuities and life-insurance, under which earned income is contingent on the length of one's life. The postwar increase in mandatory annuity and life-insurance...