Nobel Laureate in Economics, 1992

Gary Stanley Becker was born on December 2, 1930 in Pottsville, a little coal mining town in Eastern Pennsylvania, where his father owned a small business. "My father had first gone into business for himself after leaving Montreal and his family for the United States when he was only sixteen-years old. When I was four or five we moved to Brooklyn, New York, where he became a partner in another business".

Becker went to elementary school and high school in Brooklyn: "I was a good student, but until age sixteen was more interested in sports than intellectual activities. At that time I had to decide between being on the handball and math teams since they met during the same time period. It was indicative of my shift in priorities that I chose math, although I was better at handball".

His father had left school in Montreal after the 8th grade because "he was eager to make money". His mother - whose family emigrated from Eastern Europe to New York City when she was six months old - also left after the 8th grade "because girls were not expected to get much education. [...] There were only a few books in our house, but my father kept up with the political and financial news and we had many lively discussions in the house about politics and justice. I believe this does help explain why by the time I finished high school, my interest in mathematics was beginning to compete with a desire to do something useful for society. These two interests came together during my freshman year at Princeton, when I accidentally took a course in economics, and was greatly attracted by the mathematical rigor of a subject that dealt with social organization".

To be financially independent more quickly, Becker decided at the end of his first year to graduate in three years, a seldom used option at Princeton. He had to take a few extra courses during the next year, and he chose reading courses in modern algebra and differential equations for the summer afterwards. His heavy investment in mathematics at Princeton prepared him well for the increasing use of mathematics in economics.

"I began to lose interest in economics during my senior (third) year because it did not seem to deal with important social problems. I contemplated transferring to sociology, but found that subject too difficult. Fortunately, I decided to go to the University of Chicago for graduate work in economics". His first encounter in 1951 with Milton Friedman's course on microeconomics renewed his excitement about economics. "Friedman emphasized that economic theory was not a game played by clever academicians, but was a powerful tool to analyze the real world. His course was filled with insights both into the structure of economic theory and its application to practical and significant questions". That course and subsequent contacts with Friedman had a profound effect on the direction taken by his research.

While Friedman was clearly the intellectual leader, Chicago had a first class group of economists who were doing innovative research. "Especially important to me were Gregg Lewis's use of economic theory to analyze labor markets, T.W. Schultz's pioneering research on human capital, Aaron Director's applications of economics to anti-trust problems, and industrial organization more generally, and L.J. Savage's research on subjective probability and the foundation of statistics".

The Economics of Discrimination

In 1952 Becker published two articles, based on his research at Princeton. "But I realized shortly after arriving in Chicago that I had to begin to learn again what economics is all about". He published nothing else until an article written with Friedman and a book based on his Ph.D. dissertation came out in 1957, under the title The Economics of Discrimination (a second edition was published by the University of Chicago Press in 1971). The book contains the first systematic effort to use economic theory to analyze the effects of prejudice on the earnings, employment and occupations of minorities: "It started me down the path of applying economics to social issues, a path that I have continued to follow".

Regarding racial, ethnic, and similar forms of discrimination, Becker believes that "the key to prejudice is the question: how much are people willing to give up to avoid interaction with others". This has the implication that public policy can discourage discrimination by raising the price of it. In his introduction to the first edition of the book, Becker noted that economists, deferring to the presumed prior rights of other social scientists, had neglected the study of discrimination against minority groups. "I have attempted to remedy this neglect, by developing a theory of discrimination in the marketplace that supplements the psychologists' and sociologists' analysis of economic consequences. [...] This theory can be applied to 'discrimination' and 'nepotism' in all their diverse forms [having] in common the use of non-monetary considerations in deciding whether to hire, work with or buy from and individual or group. This theory is applicable not only to discrimination and nepotism in the marketplace, but also to nonmarket discrimination and nepotism and, indeed, more generally, to other kinds of non-pecuniary motivations as well.

In the ensuing chapter Becker outlined a rational model, or framework, for analyzing discrimination in the marketplace based on such non-pecuniary, or psychic, considerations as race, color, religion, gender, social class or personality. Discrimination is defined as a situation where an economic agent is prepared to incur a cost in order to refrain from an economic transaction with someone disliked on the basis of these considerations. Becker demonstrates that such behavior, in purely analytical terms, acts as a "tax wedge" between social and private economic rates of return. The explanation is that the discriminating agent behaves as if the price of the good or service purchased from the discriminated agent were higher than the price actually paid, and the selling price to the discriminated agent is lower than the price actually obtained. Discrimination thus tends to be economically detrimental not only to those who are discriminated against, but also to those who practice discrimination.

Reviewing the first edition of the book in American Sociological Review (February 1958), Karl Schuessler described it as a "something of a tour-de force [...]. Because the book lacks the critical data necessary for an indipendent test of the model some might be inclined to dismiss the entire effort. [...] Yet, a study of this scope can not be expected to accomplish everything. It is perhaps enough to indicate the type of data needed to test theoretical formulation of promise [...]. Sociologists in the field of race relations will wish to read this book". In Library Journal (August 1957), George Adelman credited Becker with not only producing "a theory and model which will be a great incentive to future economic research", but also presenting "new and unique insights which will have significant and immediate value to all concerned with discimination". The reviewer for American Economic Review (June 1958) described the essay as "an unusual book [...] filled with ingenious theorizing [...] confronted with facts". Others remarked Becker's "intimate" relating of "theory and observation" and his "trenchant critical remarks about assumptions and hypothesis [in] social psychology".

In spite of the very favorable reviews, for several years the book "had no visible impact on anything. Most economists did not think racial discrimination was economics, and sociologists and psychologists generally did not believe I was contributing to their fields. However, Friedman, Lewis, Schultz, and others at Chicago were confident I had written an important book. Support by the people I respected so highly was crucial to my willingness to persevere in the face of much hostility".

The Human Capital

After his third year of graduate study Becker became an Assistant Professor at Chicago. He had a light teaching load and could concentrate mainly on research. "However, I felt that I would become intellectually more independent if I left the nest and had to make it on my own. After three years in that position, I turned down a much larger salary from Chicago to take a similar appointment at Columbia combined with one at the National Bureau of Economic Research, then also located in Manhattan. I have always believed this was the correct decision, for I developed greater independence and self-confidence than seems likely if I remained at Chicago".

For twelve years he divided his time between teaching at Columbia and doing research at the Bureau. His book on human capital was the outgrowth of his first research project for the Bureau. In 1957 he began bringing together data on the incomes of persons with different amounts of education and on the costs of education, because "if education were economically important, money rates of return on education ought to be significant". After partially unveiling his project in an essay in the supplement to the Journal of Political Economy in 1962, Becker presented his full analysis in the monograph Human Capital: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis, with Special Reference to Education (1964, second edition 1975). The concept of human capital is considerably older than Becker's work in this field. His foremost achievement is to have formulated and formalized the microeconomic foundations of the theory. In doing so, he has developed the human-capital approach into a general theory for determining the distribution of labor income. The predictions of the theory with respect to the wage structure have been formulated in so-called human-capital-earnings functions, which specify the relation between earnings and human capital.

"Human capital refers to the skills, the training of individuals, [...] the factors that make them more productive in an economy" Becker explained in a television interview. "What human capital talks about is people's expenditures, investments in their education, their training, their medical care. What it tries to help us understand is what determines the earnings of people, the productivity of the economy, and even the growth of economies. Why do some economies grow more than others? I think human capital provides part of the answer". As to the human capital in the United States, Becker said: "I think we have the finest of college education in the world [...] where we fail is at the bottom quarter or so in education [...]: the high school dropouts, some of the high school graduates who get very poor education". Such people are not likely to be helped much by educational loans, so he would have the government play "some role [...] in helping these people get oriented into the labor force with sufficient skills". One possibility would be "a kind of voucher system [...] where high school dropouts would have the option of spending a certain amount of money on training [...]. They would take this voucher to a company that would provide training for them, or they may get it in a technical school. [...] What I am opposed to is mandating business spending on training. I think business has the right incentives about training, if you provide a competitive situation".

Reviewing the first edition of Human Capital in American Economic Review (September 1965) Albert Rees observed: "Although this work is very different from much of the traditional work of labor economics, it will have an important place in the literature of the field for many years to come".

Practical applications of the theory of human capital have been facilitated dramatically by the increased availability of microdata, for example, panel data, on wages and different characteristics of labor. This development has also been stimulated by Becker's theoretical and empirical studies. It is hardly an overstatement to say that the human-capital approach is one of the most empirically applied theories in economics today.

Working on labor economics and related subjects, Becker also transplanted at Columbia the workshop system of supervising doctoral research from Chicago - where it originated. After a few years, Jacob Mincer joined the Columbia department and became co-director of the workshop. "We had a very exciting atmosphere and attracted most of the best students at Columbia. Both Mincer and I were doing research on human capital before this subject was adequately appreciated in the profession at large, and the students found it fascinating. We were also working on the allocation of time, and other subjects in the forefront of research".

Crime and Punishment: an Economic Approach

More controversial than his concept of human capital, Becker's theories on criminology were outlined in his essay "Crime and Punishment: An Economic Approach", first published in the Journal of Political Economy (March-April 1968). "My effort to apply economic calculus to criminology can be viewed as a resurrection, modernization, and thereby I hope improvement of the pioneering studies of the eighteen-century Italian criminologist and economist Cesare Beccaria and the nineteenth-century English social philosopher Jeremy Bentham". In the essay, departing from the fashionable emphasis on social or psychopatic factors in the explanation of criminal causation or motivation, Becker focused on crime as a rational decision in which the criminal assesses his personal human capital, weights the costs and the risks of his action, including the likelihood of arrest, conviction, and punishment, and opts for the probability that crime will pay. On the criminal justice side, he applied economic calculus to the problem of selecting the "optimal", or most cost-effective, policies in enforcing law and deterring and punishing offences. "Just as the probability of conviction and the severity of punishment are subject to control by society, so too is the form of punishment: [...] usually fines, probations, institutionalization, or some combination. Is it merely an accident, or have optimality considerations determined that today, in most countries, fines are the predominant form of punishment, with institutionalization reserved for the most serious offences? [...] Probation and institutionalization use up social resources, and fines do not".

"Crime and Punishment" was among the essays by Becker brought together in The Economic Approach to Human Behavior (1976). Another was "A Theory of the Allocation of Time", in which he departed from the "traditional economic approach to consumption" and assumed that "households are producer as well as consumers". The framework developed in that essay - which considered the allocation of time and goods only "at a moment of time among various kind of consumption and time utilization" - was used in "The Allocation of Time and Good Overtime", in which he generalized his analysis to discuss decisions made over lifetime in the sector of consuption, investment in human capital, and labor force participation.

The Family Issues

Becker married for the first time in 1954, and have two daughters from that marriage, Judy and Catherine. "To provide a better family atmosphere I lived in the suburbs and commuted to Columbia and the Bureau. Eventually, I began to tire of commuting and decided either to move into New York or to leave Columbia for another university. I also was beginning to feel intellectually stale".

In 1970, he returned to Chicago, and found the atmosphere there very stimulating. The department was still powerful, especially after it had added George Stigler and Harry Johnson. "Stigler and I soon became close friends, and he had a very large effect on my subsequent intellectual development. We wrote two influential papers together: a controversial one on the stability of tastes, and an early treatment of the principle-agent problem. Stigler also renewed my interest in the economics of politics; I had published a short paper on this subject in 1958. In the 1980s I published two articles that developed a theoretical model of the role of special interest groups in the political process".

But after returning to Chicago he mainly worked on the family. "I had much earlier used economic theory to try to understand birth rates and family size. I now began to consider the whole range of family issues: marriage, divorce, altruism toward other members, investments by parents in children, and long term changes in what families do".

In the essay "A Theory of Marriage" Becker reduced to quantitative factors, to costs and benefits, the incentives for and against marriage and divorce. He pointed out that the economic approach to the study of marriage and the family in the United States "contributes important insights toward explaining the large decline in birth rates in richer industrialized countries, in contrast to the Third World during the past hundred years, the rapid expansion in the labor force participation of married women after the 1950s, the explosive advance in divorce rates during the past two decades and other major changes in the family". He systematicaly analyzed those trend in A Treatise on the Family (1981, expanded edition 1991), in which he used the analogy of "a small factory" producing "basic goods" to describe the family and its daily "production" of such items as meals and child care. Within that framework he presented as predictable behavior the changes that have been taking place in the family: use of time, number of children, choice of education, frequency of divorce, etc.

Instead of an analysis in terms of the traditional dichotomy between work and leisure, Becker's model provides a general theory for the household's allocation of time, as exemplified in the essay "A Theory of the Allocation of Time" (1965). This approach has turned out to be a highly useful foundation for examining many different issues associated with household behavior.

Becker has gone even further. He has formulated a general theory for behavior of the family - including not only the distribution of work and the allocation of time, but also decisions regarding marriage, divorce and children. As real wages increase, along with the possibilities of substituting capital for labor in housework, labor is released in the household, so that it becomes more and more uneconomical to let one member of the household specialize wholly in household production (for instance, child care). As a result, some of the family's previous social and economic functions are shifted to other institutions such as firms, schools and other public agencies. In his article, "An Economic Analysis of Marital Instability" (with E.M. Landes and R.T. Michael, , 1977), Becker has argued that these processes explain not only the increase in married women's job participation outside the home, but also the rising tendency toward divorce.

According to the notice regarding the first edition of A Treatise on the Family in Choice (August 1982), the "very productive results of Becker's analysis" should have a profound impact on the views of sociologists and economists toward this social unit" and "should certainly affect the design of social programs related to family structure". On the other hand, feminist critics to Becker's views on marriage and the family tended to be negative, sometimes vehemently so.

Becker's analysis has often been controversial and hence, at the outset, met with scepticism and even distrust. Despite this, he was not discouraged, but persevered in developing his research, gradually gaining increasing acceptance among economists for his ideas and methods. In 1993, Becker said: "For a long time my type of work was either ignored or strongly disliked by most of the leading economists. I was considered way out and perhaps not really an economist. But younger economists were more sympathetic. They may disagree with my analysis, but accept the kind of problems studied as perfectly legitimate. During the past ten years I have received much tangible evidence of this shift in professional opinion, including the presidency of the American Economic Association, the Seidman Award, and the first social science Award of Merit from the National Institute of Health".

He married for the second time in 1980 to Guity Nashat - his first wife died in 1970. This gave him two stepsons, Michael and Cyrus, to go with two daughters. "Guity is an historian of the Middle East with professional interests that overlap my own: on the role of women in economic and social life, and the causes of economic growth. The personal and professional compatibility she provides has made my life so much better".

In 1983, the Sociology Department at Chicago offered him a joint appointment. "I was happy to accept because this was an outstanding department. Its invitation to me gave a signal to the sociology profession that the rational choice approach was a respectable theoretical paradigm. James Coleman and I shortly thereafter began an interdisciplinary faculty seminar on rational choice in the social sciences that has been far more successful than we anticipated".

In 1985, Becker was asked to become a columnist for Business Week. "At that time, I had published only technical books and technical articles in professional journals. Since I feared that I could not write for a general audience, I was inclined to turn the offer down. Finally, however, my wife convinced me to do some columns on an experimental basis. It was a wise decision, for I was forced to learn how to write about economic and social issues without using technical jargon, and in about 800 words per column. Doing this has enormously improved my capacity to discuss important subjects briefly and in simple language. The pressure of having to do a column every month also makes me stay abreast of many subjects that interest the business and professional readers of the magazine".

In his monthly columns, he has made such suggestions as making prenuptial agreements, easing unemployment by relaxing the minimum-wage law under certain conditions, making welfare payments dependent upon such behavior as parents' seeing to their children's regular attendance at school, and charging immigration fees of 50,000 US$ per person to fend off an influx of further welfare burdens from abroad. He also suggested a government-funded voucher system to stimulate competition between public and private schools and the transfer, when feasible, of the ownership of apartments in public housing projects to the residents.

The Nobel Prize

On October 13, 1992 Becker was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics "for having extended the domain of microeconomic analysis to a wide range of human behavior and interaction, including nonmarket behavior".

As stated in the press release of the Nobel Foundation, "Gary Becker's research program is founded on the idea that the behavior of an individual adheres to the same fundamental principles in a number of different areas. The same explanatory model should thus be applicable in analyzing highly diverse aspects of human behavior. The explanatory model which Becker has chosen to work with is based on what he calls an economic approach, which he has applied to one area after another. This approach is characterized by the fact that individual agents - regardless of whether they are households, firms or other organizations - are assumed to behave rationally, i.e., purposefully, and that their behavior can be described as if they maximized a specifc objective function, such as utility or wealth. Gary Becker has applied the principle of rational, optimizing behavior to areas where researchers formerly assumed that behavior is habitual and often downright irrational. Becker has borrowed an aphorism from Bernard Shaw to describe his methodological philosophy: 'Economy is the art of making the most of life'".

Accounting for tastes

Since 1992 Becker has been concentrating on the study of addiction of all kinds, including nicotine, alcohol, and drug addiction. "Addiction is a puzzle: it is so contrary to rational behavior that I wanted to see if we could construct a rational model". He favors legalizing marijuana, partly to take it out of the black market and bring it under greater social control.

Becker's studies on addiction are part of the more general topic of people's consumption patterns, extensively analyzed in his most recent book Accounting for Tastes, in which he confronts the problem of preferences and values: how they are formed and how they affect our behavior. He observes, for example, that "adjacent restaurants, which have roughly the same quality of food and similar prices, may differ greatly in the number of customers they are able to attract. Why is one invariably full, while the other has seats to spare? And why is it that the profits of tobacco companies may rise when consumption falls?

The answers to these and many other questions about people's consumption patterns, Becker argues, have to do with the way preferences and values are shaped. "Once people's basic needs for food, shelter, and rest are met, their consumption depends very much on how their tastes are formed through childhood experiences and on social and cultural influences. For many kinds of behavior, there is a strong positive effect of past behavior on current behavior, and there are strong peer effects. Thus, whether a person currently smokes or uses drugs depends significantly on whether he has smoked or taken drugs in the past. Once again, Becker applies the tools of modern economic analysis to these central topics of social behavior, in order to assessing the effects of advertising, the power of peer pressure, the nature of addiction, and the function of habits.

In addition to his residence near his office in Chicago, he mantains a summer cottage on Cape Cod. Among his favorite recreations are swimming, bicyling, and tennis, at which he describes himself as "enthusiastic but mediocre".


Curriculum vitae

Academic Degrees

• B.A., Princeton University, 1951 (Summa Cum Laude)

• M.A.,University of Chicago, 1953

• Ph.D.,University of Chicago, 1955

Honorary Degrees

• Doctor Philosophiae Honoris Causa, Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel,1985

• Doctor of Laws, Knox College, Galesburg, Illinois, 1985

• Doctor of Arts, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, 1988

• Doctor of Science, State University of New York at Stony Brook, Stony Brook, New York,1990

• Doctor of Humane Letters, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey,1991

• Doctor Philosophiae Honoris Causa, University of Palermo, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1993

• Doctor of Humane Letters, Columbia University in the City of New York, 1993

• Doctoris Honoris Causa Scientiarum Oeconomicarum, Warsaw School of Economics, 1995

• Doctoris Honoris Causa, University of Economics, Prague , 1995

• Doctor of Business Administration, University of Miami, 1995

• Doctor of Science, University of Rochester, 1995

• Doctor of Humane Letters, Hofstra University, New York, 1997

Academic Appointments

• University Professor, University of Chicago, Departments of Economics and Sociology, 1983 - present;

• University of Chicago, Department of Economics, 1970-1983; Chairman, Department of Economics, 1984-1985

• Ford Foundation Visiting Professor of Economics, University of Chicago, 1969-1970

• Arthur Lehman Professor of Economics, Columbia University, 1968-1969

• Professor of Economics, Columbia University, 1960-1968

• Assistant and Associate Professor of Economics, Columbia University, 1957-1960

• Assistant Professor, University of Chicago, 1954-1957

Other Professional Appointments

• Columnist, Business Week, 1985-present

• Economic Advisor to Presidential Candidate Robert Dole, 1996

• Research Associate, Economics Research Center, NORC, 1980-present

• Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution, 1990-present

• Member, Domestic Advisory Board, Hoover Institution, 1973-1991

• Member, Academic Advisory Board, American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, 1987-1991

• Associate Member, Institute of Fiscal and Monetary Policy, Ministry of Finance, Japan, 1988 -present

• Member, Senior Research Associate and Research Policy Advisor to the Center for Economic Analysis of Human Behavior and Social Institutions, National Bureau of Economic Research, 1957-1979

• Board of Publications, University of Chicago Press, 1971-1975 Professional Societies

• American Economic Association: Distinguished Fellow, 1988; President, 1987; Vice President, 1974; Editorial Board, American Economic Review, 1968-1971

• American Statistical Association, 1955

• Econometric Society

• Economic History Association

• Western Economic Association: Vice President, 1995-1996; President, 1996-1997

• American Sociological Society

Elected Societies

• Mont Pelerin Society, 197l; Executive Board, 1985-present; Vice-President, 1989; President, 1990-1992

• Member, National Academy of Sciences, 1975-present

• Member, American Philosophical Society, 1986-present

• Fellow, American Statistical Association, 1965

• Fellow, Econometric Society, 1967

• Founding Member, National Academy of Education, 1965; Vice-President, 1965-1967

• Fellow, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1972-present

• Member, International Union for the Scientific Study of Population, 1982-present

• Fellow, National Association of Business Economists, 1993-present

• Member, Pontifical Academy of Sciences, 1997-present

• Phi Beta Kappa, Princeton University, 1950

Awards

• W.S. Woytinsky Award, for Human Capital, University of Michigan, 1964

• John Bates Clark Medal, American Economic Association, 1967

• Professional Achievement Award, University of Chicago Alumni Association, 1968

• Frank E. Seidman Distinguished Award in Political Economy, 1985

• Merit Award, National Institutes of Health, US Department of Health and Human Services, 1986

• John R. Commons Award, Omicron Delta Epsilon, 1987

• Nobel Prize for Economic Sciences, 1992

• Lord Foundation Award, 1995

• 50 Great Americans, Marquis Who's Who, 1995

• Harold Lasswell Award, Policy Studies Organization, 1996

• Honorary Member, Gente Nueva, Mexico City, 1996

• Irene B. Taeuber Award for Excellence in Demographic Research, Population Association of America, 1997

Publications

Monographs

Familie, Gesellschaft und Politik (Family, Society, and State ) , Mohr Siebeck, 1996

The Economics of Life, McGraw-Hill, Inc., 1996

Accounting for Tastes, Harvard University Press, 1996

A Treatise on the Family, Harvard University Press, 1981; expanded edition, 1991; Spanish translation, 1987; Chinese translation, 1988

The Economic Approach to Human Behavior, University of Chicago Press, 1976; German translation, 1982; Polish translation, 1990; Chinese translation, 1993; Romanian translation, 1994

Essays in Labor Economics in Honor of H. Gregg Lewis, edited, Special Supplement to the Journal of Political Economy , 84, no. 2, part 2, August, 1976

The Allocation of Time and Goods Over the Life Cycle, with Gilbert Ghez, Columbia University Press for the National Bureau of Economic Research, 1975

Essays in the Economics of Crime and Punishment, edited with William M. Landes, Columbia University Press for the National Bureau of Economic Research, 1974

Economic Theory, A. Knopf, 1971; Japanese translation, 1976

Human Capital and the Personal Distribution of Income: An Analytical Approach, University of Michigan, 1967

Human Capital, Columbia University Press, 1964; second edition, 1975; third editon, 1993; Japanese translation, 1975; Spanish translation, 1984

The Economics of Discrimination, University of Chicago Press, 1957; second edition, 1971

Selected Articles

"The Endogenous Determination of Time Preference", with Casey B. Mulligan, The Quarterly Journal of Economics, CXII (no. 2): 729-758, August 1997

"An Empirical Analysis of Cigarette Addiction", with Michael Grossman and Kevin M. Murphy, American Economic Review, 84 (no. 3): 396-418, June 1994

"A Simple Theory of Advertising as a Good or Bad", with Kevin M. Murphy, Quarterly Journal of Economics, CVIII (no. 4): 941-964, November 1993

"George Joseph Stigler: January 17, 1911-December 1, 1991", Journal of Political Economy, 101: (no. 5): 761-767, October 1993

"Cross-Cultural Differences in Family and Sexual Life: An Economic Analysis", with Richard Posner, Rationality and Society, 5 (no 4): 421-431, October 1993

"Nobel Lecture: The Economic Way of Looking at Behavior", Journal of Political Economy, 101 (no. 3): 385-409, June1993

"Government, Human Capital, and Economic Growth" (Presidential Address to the Mont Pelerin Society, Vancouver General Meeting, September, 1992), Industry of Free China, 79 (no. 6): 47-56, June, 1993

"Rational Addiction and the Effect of Price on Consumption", with Michael Grossman and Kevin M. Murphy, in George Loewenstein and Jon Elster (eds.), Choice Over Time, Russell Sage Foundation, 1992

"George Joseph Stigler", Journal des Economistes et des Etudes Humaines, 3 (no. 1): 5-9, March, 1992

"The Division of Labor, Coordination Costs, and Knowledge", with Kevin M. Murphy, Quarterly Journal of Economics, CVII (no. 4): 1137-1160, November, 1992

"Fertility and the Economy", Journal of Population Economics, 5 (no. 3): 185-201, 1992

"Habits, Addictions and Traditions", Kyklos, 45 (fasc. 3): 327-346, 1992

"Human Capital and the Economy", Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 136 (no. 1): 85-92, March, 1992

"Education, Labor Force Quality and the Economy", Business Economics, XXVII (no. 1): 7-12, January, 1992

"Milton Friedman", in Edward Shils (ed.), Remembering the University of Chicago: Teachers, Scientists, and Scholars, University of Chicago Press, 1991

"A Note on Restaurant Pricing and Other Examples of Social Influences on Price", Journal of Political Economy, 99 (no. 1): 1109-1116, October, 1991

"Rational Addiction and the Effect of Price on Consumption", with Michael Grossman and Kevin M. Murphy, AEA Papers and Proceedings, 81 (no. 2): 237-241, May, 1991

"Human Capital, Fertility, and Economic Growth", with Kevin M. Murphy and Robert Tamura, Journal of Political Economy, 98 (no. 5, pt. 2): S12-S70, October, 1990

"Fertility Choice in a Model of Economic Growth", with Robert Barro, Econometrica, 57: 481-501, March, 1989

"A Theory of Rational Addiction", with Kevin M. Murphy, Journal of Political Economy, 96: 675-700, August, 1988

"The Family and the State", with Kevin M. Murphy, Journal of Law and Economics, 31: 1-18, April, 1988

"Family Economics and Macro Behavior" (Presidential Address to the American Economic Association, December 29, 1988), American Economic Review, 86 (no. 1), March, 1989

"A Reformulation of the Economic Theory of Fertility", with Robert J. Barro, Quarterly Journal of Economics, CIII (no. 1): 1-25, February, 1988

"Human Capital and the Rise and Fall of Families", with Nigel Tomes, Journal of Labor Economics, 4 (no. 3, pt. 2): S1-S39, July, 1986

"Special Interests and Public Policies", Acceptance Paper, The Frank E. Seidman Distinguished Award in Political Economy, Rhodes College, September 26, 1985

"Public Policies, Pressure Groups, and Dead Weight Costs", Journal of Public Economics, 28 (1985): 329-347

"Pressure Groups and Political Behavior", in R. D. Coe and C.K. Wilbur, eds., Capitalism and Democracy: Schumpeter Revisited, Notre Dame IN, University of Notre Dame Press, 1985

"An Economic Analysis of the Family", Seventeenth Geary Lecture, The Economic and Social Research Institute, Dublin, Ireland, 1985

"Human Capital, Effort, and the Sexual Division of Labor", Journal of Labor Economics, 3 (no. 1, pt. 2): S33-S58, January, l985

"A Theory of Competition Among Pressure Groups for Political Influence", Quarterly Journal of Economics, XCVII (no. 3): 371-400, August, 1983

"Altruism in the Family and Selfishness in the Market Place", Economica, 48: 1-15, February, 1981

"An Equilibrium Theory of the Distribution of Income and Intergenerational Mobility", with Nigel Tomes, Journal of Political Economy, 87 (no. 6): 1153-1189, December, 1979

"Economic Analysis and Human Behavior", in L. Levy-Garboua, ed., Sociological Economics, Beverly Hills CA, Sage, 1979

"An Economic Analysis of Marital Instability", with E.M. Landes and R.T. Michael, Journal of Political Economy, 85 (no. 6): 1153-1189, December, 1977

"De Gustibus Non Est Disputandum", with G.J. Stigler, The American Economic Review, 67 (no. 2): 76-90, March, 1977

"Altruism, Egoism, and Genetic Fitness: Economics and Sociobiology", Journal of Economic Literature, XIV (no. 3): 817-826, September, 1976

"Child Endowments and the Quantity and Quality of Children", with Nigel Tomes, in G.S. Becker, ed., Essays in Labor Economics in Honor of H. Gregg Lewis, Special Supplement to the Journal of Political Economy, 84 (no. 4, part 2), August, 1976

"A Theory of Social Interactions", Journal of Political Economy, 82 (no. 6): 1063-1093, November-December, 1974

"A Theory of Marriage, Part II", Journal of Political Economy, 82 (no. 2, part 2): S11-S26, March-April, 1974; reprinted in T.W. Schultz, ed., Economics of the Family, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1974

"Law Enforcement, Malfeasance, and Compensation of Enforcers", with G.J. Stigler, Journal of Legal Studies, III (no. 1): 1-18, January, 1974

"On the New Theory of Consumer Behavior", with R.T. Michael, Swedish Journal of Economics, 75: 378-396, 1973

"A Theory of Marriage: Part I", Journal of Political Economy, 81 (no. 4): 813-846, July-August, 1973; reprinted in T.W. Schultz, ed., Economics of the Family, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1974

"On the Interaction Between the Quantity and Quality of Children", with H.G. Lewis, Journal of Political Economy, 81 (no. 2, part 2): S279-S288, March-April, 1973

"Market Insurance, Self-Insurance, and Self-Protection", with I. Ehrlich, Journal of Political Economy, 80 (no. 4): 623-648, July-August, 1972

"Crime and Punishment: An Economic Approach", Journal of Political Economy, 76 (no. 2): 169-217, March-April, l968

"Education and the Distribution of Earnings", with B. Chiswick, American Economic Review, LVI (no. 2): 358-369, May, l966

"A Theory of the Allocation of Time", Economic Journal, LXXV (no. 299): 493-508, September, l965

"Underinvestment in College Education?", American Economic Review, 50 (no. 2): 346-354, 1960; reprinted in E. Phelps, ed., Problems of Economic Growth, New York, W.W. Norton, 1962

"Investment in Human Capital: A Theoretical Analysis", Journal of Political Economy, LXX (no. 5, part 2): 9-49, October, 1962

"Irrational Behavior and Economic Theory", Journal of Political Economy, LXX (no. 1): 1-13, February, 1962

"The Classical Monetary Theory: The Outcome of the Discussion", with W.J. Baumol, revised and published in J. Spengler and W. Allen, eds., Essays in Economic Thought, Chicago, Rand McNally and Co., 1960

"An Economic Analysis of Fertility", in Demographic and Economic Change in Developed Countries, Conference of the Universities-National Bureau Committee for Economic Research, a Report of the National Bureau of Economic Research, Princeton NJ, Princeton University Press, 1960, pp. 209-40

"Union Restrictions on Entry", in Philip D. Bradley, ed., The Public Stake in Union Power, Charlottesville VA, University of Virginia Press, 1959

"Competition and Democracy", Journal of Law and Economics, 1: 105-109, 1958

"A Statistical Illusion in Judging Keynesian Models", with M. Friedman, Journal of Political Economy, LXV (no. l): 64-75, February, 1957

"The Classical Monetary Theory: The Outcome of the Discussion", with W. J. Baumol, Economica, XIX (76): 355-376, November, 1952

"A Note on Multi-Country Trade", American Economic Review, XLII (no. 4): 558-568, September, 1952