Gary Becker's path-breaking Treatise on the Family (1981) subjected individuals' decisions about sex, marriage, childbearing, and childrearing to rational choice analysis. The American family has changed radically in recent decades; we survey these changes as well as the ongoing effort to...

The standard economic model of the family is a 'common preference' model that assumes that a family maximizes a single utility function and implies that family behavior is independent of which individuals receive income or control resources. In recent years, this model has been challenged by...

This paper argues that dealing with current concerns about the CPI within the framework of economic theory requires developing the theory of the cost-of-living index under more general assumptions than have thus far been standard. It examines three neglected but critical issues that should rank...