A new virtual issue of The Economic Journal, ‘Family Economics’ is out now and can be read online for free for a limited time.
Households are simultaneously the primary locus of consumption, labour supply, fertility decisions, human capital formation, and risk-sharing; they are also the site of strategic interaction between individuals whose preferences, endowments, and information sets need not coincide. Understanding how families form, how they organise production and consumption, and how they respond to policy and aggregate shocks lies at the intersection of microeconomic theory, public finance, labour economics, macroeconomics, and development economics.
With an introduction by Editor Franck Portier, this virtual issue of The Economic Journal showcases 11 previously published articles, a selection of particularly influential and illuminating contributions on these questions, spanning six decades of cumulative scholarship.
The collection is organised into three broad categories:
theoretical foundations,
quantitative and structural analysis, and
applied empirical work.
The theoretical contributions established the conceptual language (household production, collective rationality, bargaining, and resource allocation) that the structural and reduced-form branches of the literature subsequently operationalised. Bringing these strands together in a single issue allows the reader to trace the intellectual lineage of the field and to appreciate how foundational insights have been refined, challenged, and extended by subsequent work.
Taken together, these 11 contributions trace family economics from Becker’s foundational recasting of the household as a site of production, through structural models that embed bargaining and risk-sharing in calibrated economies, to quasi-experimental evidence on parental leave and cash transfers. They show a field whose theoretical core has, across six decades, kept pace with increasingly credible identification, even as the question that animates it, namely how power and resources are shared within the family, remains the centre of fresh and increasingly inventive empirical investigation.