This paper explores the workings of stratified societies in which there is primogeniture and where the nobility practice monogamous marriage with a double standard of sexual fidelity. The paper models a simple stratified society and defines the reproductive values of male and female nobility...

Large, short-run fluctuations in the birth rate have been an important demographic feature of industrialized, low-fertility populations in the twentieth century. Since females normally marry men who are two or three years older than themselves, these fluctuations result in large imbalances...

This paper considers a series of examples in which evolution supports cooperative behavior in single-shot prisoners' dilemma. Examples include genetic inheritance for asexual siblings and for sexual diploid siblings. We also study two models of ``cultural inheritance''; one in which siblings...

Consider a public utility that offers its service at two different times. We study the effects of a change from uniform pricing throughout the day to peak-load pricing. We show that for a utility constrained to operate with a fixed rate of return on capital, the introduction of peak-load pricing...

This paper is an advertisement for some facts and ideas that I think likely to lead to a richer theory of the economics of the family. The discussion references many papers from anthropology and biology. Because of the intimate connection between the family and reproduction, it should not be...

This paper explores the evolutionary foundations of altruism among siblings. It is intended as a contribution to the theory of the evolution of preferences, the economics of the family, and the evolutionary biology of kin selection. This paper extends the kin- selection theory of the biologist,...

This is a survey of theoretical work (and some empirical work) related to the economics of the family. It was written for the forthcoming Handbook in Population Theory and was substantially revised in June 1994.