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This article describes the economic approach to analyzing family behavior pioneered by Becker, focusing on two areas: household production and altruism. The household production model addresses the important question of how costs, technological changes, and social changes affect the ways in which families rear children and, in turn, reflect the importance of children in our society. Becker's work on altruism explores the nature of parent-parent and parent-child relationships and how these relationships affect resource allocation within the family. Modeling altruism also provides insights into how parent's behavior toward their children is affected by government policies.

Family life has been radically transformed over the past three decades. Half of all households are unmarried, while only a quarter of all married households have kids. A third of the nation's births are to unwed mothers, and a third of America's married men earn less than their wives. With half of all women cohabitating before they turn thirty and gay and lesbian couples settling down with increasing visibility, there couldn't be a better time for a book that tracks new conceptions of marriage and family as they are being formed. The editors of this volume explore the motivation to marry and the role of matrimony in a diverse group of men and women. They compare empirical data from several emerging family types (single, co-parent, gay and lesbian, among others) to studies of traditional nuclear families, and they consider the effect of public policy and recent economic developments on the practice of marriage and the stabilization& mdash;or destabilization& mdash;of family. Approaching this topic from a variety of perspectives, including historical, cross-cultural, gendered, demographic, socio-biological, and social-psychological viewpoints, the editors highlight the complexity of the modern American family and the growing indeterminacy of its boundaries. Refusing to adhere to any one position, the editors provide an unbiased account of contemporary marriage and family.

The Easterlin effect posits cyclical changes in demographic and social behavior as the result of fluctuations in birth rates and cohort size during the post-World War II period. Large cohort size reduces the economic opportunities of its members and reduces income relative to smaller parental generations. Low relative economic status in turn leads to lower fertility, higher rates of female labor force participation, later marriage, higher divorce and illegitimacy, and increasing homicide, suicide, and alienation. Cycles in birth rates and cohort size suggest that the small baby bust cohorts entering adulthood in the 1990s will enjoy higher relative income, more traditional family structures, and lower levels of social disorganization. Of interest to economists and sociologists, the Easterlin effect has generated a large literature in the several decades since it was first proposed. Our review of the empirical studies notes the diversity of support across behaviors, time periods, and nations. Up to 1980, changes in wages, fertility, and social disorganization closely matched cohort size, but individual-level studies found little influence of relative income within cohorts. Further, the correspondence of the trends ends in the 1980s and appears in few countries other than the United States. Our review emphasizes both the contingent nature of the Easterlin effect and the way in which conditions have changed in recent decades to reduce the salience of cohort size for social and demographic behavior.

Although federal and state support for childcare has increased dramatically in response to welfare work requirements, low-income families are still facing difficulties balancing work and family obligations. There is wide variation across states in the strictness of welfare work requirements and in the generosity of childcare support. In addition, the level of co-payments required and the flexibility to use subsidies for informal modes of childcare differ across states, leading families to make different childcare and employment choices. The purpose of From Welfare to Childcare i