A Treatise on the Family. G. S. Becker. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1981. Gary Becker is one of the most famous and influential economists of the second half of the 20th century, a fervent contributor to and expounder of the University of Chicago free-market philosophy, and winner of the 1992 Nobel Prize in economics. Although any book with the word "treatise" in its title is clearly intended to have an impact, one coming from someone as brilliant and controversial as Becker certainly had such a lofty goal. It has received many article-length reviews in several disciplines (Ben-Porath, 1982; Bergmann, 1995; Foster, 1993; Hannan, 1982), which is one measure of its scholarly importance, and yet its impact is, I think, less than it may have initially appeared, especially for scholars with substantive interests in the family. This book is, its title notwithstanding, more about economics and the economic approach to behavior than about the family. In the first sentence of the preface, Becker writes "In this book, I develop an economic or rational choice approach to the family." Lest anyone accuse him of focusing on traditional (i.e., material) economics topics, such as family income, poverty, and labor supply, he immediately emphasizes that those topics are not his focus. "My intent is more ambitious: to analyze marriage, births, divorce, division of labor in households, prestige, and other non-material behavior with the tools and framework developed for material behavior." Indeed, the book includes chapters on many of these issues. One chapter examines the principles of the efficient division of labor in households, three analyze marriage and divorce, three analyze various child-related issues (fertility and intergenerational mobility), and others focus on broader family issues, such as intrafamily resource allocation. His analysis is not, he believes, constrained by time or place. His intention is "to present a comprehensive analysis that is applicable, at least in part, to families in the past as well as the present, in primitive as well as modern societies, and in Eastern as well as Western cultures." His tone is profoundly conservative and utterly skeptical of any constructive role for government programs. There is a clear sense of how much better things were in the old days of a genderbased division of labor and low market-work rates for married women. Indeed, Becker is ready and able to show in Chapter 2 that such a state of affairs was efficient and induced not by market or societal discrimination (although he allows that it might exist) but by small underlying household productivity differences that arise primarily from what he refers to as "complementarities" between caring for young children while carrying another to term. Most family scholars would probably find that an unconvincingly simple explanation for a profound and complex phenomenon. What, then, is the salient contribution of Treatise on the Family? It is not literally the idea that economics could be applied to the nonmarket sector and to family life because Becker had already established that with considerable success and influence. At its core, microeconomics is simple, characterized by a belief in the importance of prices and markets, the role of self-interested or rational behavior, and, somewhat less centrally, the stability of preferences. It was Becker's singular and invaluable contribution to appreciate that the behaviors potentially amenable to the economic approach were not limited to phenomenon with explicit monetary prices and formal markets. Indeed, during the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s, he did undeniably important and pioneering work extending the domain of economics to such topics as labor market discrimination, fertility, crime, human capital, household production, and the allocation of time. Nor is Becker's contribution the detailed analyses themselves. Many of them are, frankly, odd, idiosyncratic, and off-putting. …

A Treatise on the Family

Statistical Analysis with Missing Data

A detailed review of the education sector in Australia as in the data provided by the 2006 edition of the OECD's annual publication, 'Education at a Glance' is presented. While the data has shown that in almost all OECD countries educational attainment levels are on the rise, with countries showing impressive gains in university qualifications, it also reveals that a large of share of young people still do not complete secondary school, which remains a baseline for successful entry into the labour market.

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Education at a Glance

Regression Analysis of Count Data: Preface

特集 友情 Friendship

Social capital is defined as the individual’s pool of social resources found in his/her personal network. A recent study on Italians living as couples has shown that friendship relationships, beyond those within an individual’s family, are an important source of support. Here, we used data from Aspects of Daily Life, the Italian National Statistical Institute’s 2012 multipurpose survey, to analyze the relation between friendship ties and life satisfaction. Our results show that friendship, in terms of intensity (measured by the frequency with which individuals see their friends) and quality (measured by the satisfaction with friendship relationships), is positively associated to life satisfaction.

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Social relations and life satisfaction: the role of friends

Union dissolution is a constantly increasing phenomenon across Europe—even in Italy where the prevalence of divorce has always been among the lowest. This poses several questions on the potential consequences of such an event on the families involved. Many studies show that women usually experience the worst financial consequences, although there are few analyses on Italy, given the relatively low levels of union instability. In this work we study the impact of separation on the economic well-being of men and women using data from the European Community Household Panel (ECHP), analyzed using both objective and subjective measures. By means of a matching method, we also estimate the effect of union dissolution, taking account of possible variations according to the different living arrangements adopted by ex-partners after separation. Results confirm that women experience worse economic distress than men. However, there is also a significant drop in economic well-being among non-custodial fathers who live alone after separation. In addition, it is found that income-based measures do not encapsulate all the dimensions of well-being, and therefore need to be complemented with other measures.

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Economic Consequences of Union Dissolution in Italy: Findings from the European Community Household Panel

Over the last few decades, increasing attention has been paid to the issue of wellbeing among older people, and life satisfaction has been used as an indicator to evaluate older people's life conditions. This paper sheds some light on this topic with reference to Italy, a country characterised by an increasing ageing population. The aim is to examine life satisfaction among people aged 65 and older and its predictors. We adopt a gender approach to examine whether – as suggested by the literature – older men and women have different sources of satisfaction. We test this hypothesis in Italy, a country still characterised by an unbalanced public and private gender system. In doing this, we also control whether living arrangements – specifically living alone – influence the determinants of life satisfaction of older men and women. The data used are from the cross-sectional surveys ‘Aspects of Daily Life’, undertaken in Italy by the National Statistical Institute. The results do not show clear gender differences in the determinants of life satisfaction, with only some slight gender differences among those living alone. This suggests that the social and cultural environment may play a relevant role for older people's life satisfaction.

Life satisfaction among older people in Italy in a gender approach

This paper examines in depth the determinants of repartnering in Italy. With data from a national survey conducted in 2003, the effects of socio-economic, demographic and contextual characteristics on second-union formation among separated women are examined. The analysis is of particular interest in a country such as Italy, which is undergoing a transition from traditional to modern family behaviours. In addition, it allows us to verify the hypothesis that the importance of demographic factors in the repartnering process decreases as marital instability becomes more common. Results of event history analysis models confirm the basic hypothesis and show some unexpected effects. 1. Introduction In Italy, the phenomenon of marital disruption is relatively recent and still not very common (ISTAT 2007). This is probably due to cultural and normative factors, which make separation costly, from both emotional and economic viewpoints. In Italy, indeed, the "sacredness" of the first marriage is still important (Rosina and Fraboni 2004). In addition, divorce was introduced by law only in 1970, and only since 1987 has the time required to request a divorce after legal separation been reduced from 5 to 3 years. Not surprisingly, therefore, in Italy unions after the first marriage are not very common, even when the end of the first union is a choice and is undergone by relatively young individuals: in 2003, couples at their second union, including those after widowhood, represented only 5% of all couples (ISTAT 2006). However, marital dissolution is rapidly increasing (ISTAT 2007), indicating that new unions formed after the first marriage may also be more common. In this paper, we examine the factors influencing repartnering (cohabitation or remarriage) among Italian women who dissolved their first marriage. The international literature is rich in studies on this topic (e.g., Hunt 1966; Thornton 1977; Wu and Schimmele 2005). It has been shown that repartnering may be influenced both by demographic factors (i.e., age of the woman at separation, children born during the first marriage) and by socio-economic characteristics (woman's education and her employment status). To date, however, the literature cannot always explain why some factors (e.g., children, woman's human capital) show mixed effects, and which mechanisms actually explain these results. Our aim is to analyse in depth the determinants of repartnering in order to shed light on the mechanisms underlying this phenomenon among separated women living in a country like Italy, which is undergoing a transition from traditional to modern family behaviours. The few studies about repartnering in Italy are based on data from the second half of the 1990s (Rettaroli 2002; Angeli and De Rose 2003); as the phenomenon was then still recent, these pioneering studies faced limitations in both sample size and variables. The availability of data from the survey "Family and Social Subjects", conducted in Italy in 2003, overcame most of these problems and, as a result, the effects of some key factors (i.e., woman's employment status and the characteristics of first-marriage children) may be better analysed. Data from this survey also allowed us to verify whether there is a contextual effect that influences the determinants of repartnering. Our basic hypothesis is that the opportunities of a second union for separated women are influenced by the level of diffusion of marital instability and, more generally, by the level of social acceptance of new family behaviours. In particular, we assume that the social costs of repartnering decrease, passing from a traditional to a more modern context; with them, the importance of some women's demographic characteristics, which influence these costs, also decrease. Differences between the North and South of Italy, according to the diffusion of behaviours typical of the Second Demographic Transition (Gesano et al. 2007; De Rose 1992; Rettaroli 1997), are used to test this hypothesis. …

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Repartnering after marital dissolution: Does context play a role?

Using a sample of Italian women interviewed in 2003 in the survey "Family and Social Subject," this paper investigates two issues: (1) how a woman's family life-course (union status and parity/ages of children born in the first marriage) influences the risk of a post-dissolution birth among separated women; and (2) how the experience of a marital disruption affects a woman's cumulated fertility. Given that in Italy marital instability is relatively recent and still barely socially accepted, our main assumption is that separated women engage in more prudent reproductive behaviour than their counterparts living in countries with a longer experience of the phenomenon. With respect to the first point, our results show that: (i) not only remarriage, but also cohabitation, are strongly associated with the likelihood of post-dissolution childbearing; (ii) significant differences in the risk of having a child following the dissolution of a marriage are present only between separated women with no children and separated women with children; thus, separated women with one child have the same probability of experiencing a post-dissolution birth as those with two or more children, and the age of children is irrelevant. With respect to the second point, we find that women who underwent a marital dissolution have lower fertility than those who remained continuously married, and that repartnering enables this group of women to recapture some-but not all-of the fertility lost with the dissolution of the first marriage. (ProQuest: ... denotes formulae omitted.) 1. Introduction Since the numbers of separations and divorces in Europe began to climb in the 1970s, scholars have become increasingly interested in studying the implications of these trends on individuals' fertility. As significant numbers of women and men spend a proportion of their lives in a "post-dissolution" state, important questions arise about their reproductive behaviour. To what extent is marital instability a source of discontinuity of the reproductive career that ultimately reduces the family size of individuals? Which individuals are more likely to have children after marital dissolution? Are there specific circumstances or biographic patterns that may compensate for, or even reverse, the potential negative effects of separation on fertility? A marital dissolution interrupts the period, which began with marriage, when a woman is at risk of conception, and thus lowers the chances that she will achieve the expected family size. As a consequence, marital instability may, theoretically, be considered a depressing factor for fertility. However, empirical studies have not always supported this hypothesis. Some of them have indeed demonstrated that separation has a negative effect on fertility (Lesthaeghe and Moors 1994; Thomson et al. forthcoming). Other studies have, however, found that, in the case of repartnering, the fertility of separated individuals may be similar to, or only slightly lower than, the fertility of individuals in intact marriages (Jansen, Wijckmans, and Bavel 2008; Beaujouan and Solaz 2008). These findings therefore suggest that the negative effect of exposure to the risk of conception might be overestimated. More recent studies focusing on childbearing patterns among stepfamilies tend to support this hypothesis: they have found that the desire to have shared children with the new partner may lead to a recapturing of most of the "lost children" due to the dissolution of the first marriage (Thomson and Li 2002; Thomson et al. 2002). This paper aims to examine the relationship between marital instability and fertility, with a focus on the female population. Two specific issues are examined. First, we study the determinants of childbearing following separation among women who experienced a marital dissolution; in this analysis, we are specifically interested in the role played by some family life-course factors connected with the experience of separation (i. …

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Silvia Meggiolaro

Papers

Social relations and life satisfaction: the role of friends

Economic Consequences of Union Dissolution in Italy: Findings from the European Community Household Panel

Life satisfaction among older people in Italy in a gender approach

Repartnering after marital dissolution: Does context play a role?

The implications of marital instability for a woman's fertility: Empirical evidence from Italy