Before the Industrial Revolution, most scientists considered fertility, mortality and population as interacting with economic circumstances. When Khaldun (1377) pioneered classical economics, he described how population interplays with the rise and decline of cities by allowing a deeper division of labor and generating increasing returns to scale. When, in the 17th century, Petty (1687) compared the relative development of England, France, and Holland, population was at the center of his calculations, both as an outcome and source of wealth. And, according to the French physiocrats (Mirabeau 1756) as well as Bruckner (1768), who foreshadowed the Malthusian view on population checks by half a century, population needed to be incentivized to grow.

Gary Becker, an American economist, died on May 3, 2014, at the age of 83. His major contribution was the systematic application of economics to the analysis of social issues. He used economics to study discrimination, criminal behavior, human capital, marriage, fertility and other social issues.

In his seminal, 1973 paper, published in the Journal of Political Economy, Gary Becker emphasizes marriage as a crucial, yet understudied issue to which economic analysis could, therefore should, be applied. In his words:

Gary Becker's theories of marriage were mentioned as one of the reasons why he was awarded the Nobel prize in economics in 1992 and were emphasized by Becker: his first article on the family published in a major journal (Becker 1973) is a theory of marriage and the chapters on marriage in his influential Treatise on the Family (Becker 1981, 1991) come first. Becker's theoretical models of marriage all view marriages as small non-profit firms engaged in household production, thereby featuring one of the basic tenets of the New Home Economics that Becker pioneered with Jacob Mincer while both were at Columbia University in the 1960s (see Becker 1960, 1965; Mincer 1962, 1963).

Gary Becker’s work on “human capital” started around 1960. It was motivated by the rising interest in economic growth at the time. As stated in the introduction to the first edition of his book, Human Capital, “The origin of this study can be traced to the finding that a substantial growth in incomes in the US remains after the growth of physical capital and labor has been accounted for”. This unexplained residual suggested to several researchers that unmeasured features of the quality of the labor force must also be brought into consideration. While econometricians such as Edward Denison, Dale Jorgenson, and Zvi Griliches turned to seek better data that would reduce the scope of the unexplained residual, Becker constructed a detailed and original theory regarding the possible effects of a major unobserved and all inclusive factor, termed, human capital, would have on observed outcomes such as wages and education and their variation over time and among individual types. Most of the theoretical results reported in the three editions of Human Capital, 1964, 1975, and 1995 are already anticipated in a single early paper that was published in the Journal of Political Economy in 1962.

How well do parents’ education, earnings, income, and wealth predict the same outcomes for their children? Scientists have been trying to answer this question for a long time. Francis Galton (1822–1911) was the first to apply statistical methods to tackle this question. Centuries earlier, the great Arab scholar Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406) famously observed that the prestige lasted at best four generations in one lineage.

Becker analyzes racial discrimination given its existence; as we know from his 1977 paper with George Stigler, “De Gustibus Non Est Disputandum,” Becker felt that the determination of preferences was to be taken as given, at least from the standpoint of conducting neoclassical economic analysis. One of the ingredients of this research is the distribution of racial animus in the populations of employers, employees, and customers. The most interesting and memorable feature of the analysis is the examination of equilibrium racial wage and employment outcomes when there are “tastes” for discrimination of various kinds and labor and product markets vary in their degree of competitiveness.

Gary Becker's contributions to health economics started somewhat indirectly. The early development in human capital theory, to which Becker was one of the main contributors, had obvious implications to the analysis of expenditures on health, but were almost exclusively focused on schooling and training (Schultz 1960; Becker 1962, 1964). Human capital theory advanced the idea that actions that imply present costs but enhanced individual productivity in the future could be seen as investments in a form of capital. Expenditures in health had many dimensions where such trade-offs were present. A good diet or exercising might not be very much fun, but potentially delivered long-term benefits in the form of a longer and healthier life. Preventive medical care demanded time and money, but might also improve future health prospects. This was recognized early on (Mushkin, 1962), but the first explorations of health as human capital were conceptually timid and did not give the field a push that remotely resembled that received by the economic research on education. For the years that followed, health economics persisted mostly as a field dealing with the analysis of health systems and delivery of health technologies.

Before Gary Becker, fertility choice was widely considered to be outside the realm of economic analysis. Apart from intellectual tradition, one reason for this was that the data on fertility did not immediately suggest an economic mechanism. In industrialized countries, fertility had declined strongly over time, even though family incomes were rising. Similarly, in many studies using cross-sectional data the relationship between family income and fertility had been shown to be either flat or declining. To many observers, these observations suggested that the “taste” for children had waned over time and that high income families placed less value on childbearing than the poor.

It was a different era when Gary Becker did his groundbreaking work on the economics of fertility, during the years from the late 1950 through the early 1990s. There was great concern then about the “population explosion” due to sustained high fertility in the developing world after mortality declined following World War II. In 1968, Paul Ehrlich published “The Population Bomb” predicting disaster and mass starvation due to rapid population growth: “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s, the world will undergo famines – hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death. . . .” Robert McNamara, then the President of the World Bank, in 1984 said “Short of thermonuclear war itself, population growth is the gravest issue the world faces over the decades immediately ahead. If we do not act, the problem will be solved by famine, riots, insurrection and war.”

We study the large observed changes in labor supply by married women in the United States over the post-World War II period, a period that saw little change in the labor supply by single women. We investigate the effects of changes in the gender wage gap, the quantitative impact of technological improvements in the production of nonmarket goods, and the potential inferiority of nonmarket goods in explaining the dramatic change in labor supply. We find that small decreases in the gender wage gap can simultaneously explain the significant increases in the average hours worked by married women and the relative constancy in the hours worked by single women and by single and married men. We also find that the impact of technological improvements in the household on married female hours and on the relative wage of females to males is too small for realistic values. Some specifications of the inferiority of home goods match the hours patterns, but they have counterfactual predictions for wages and expenditure patterns.

This paper first elaborates a model of intermediate selection where potential migrants must have both the resources to finance the migration cost (liquidity constraint restriction) and an income gain of migrating (economic incentives restriction). We then test the predictions of the model regarding the impact of output in the sending country and migration costs on average skill level of immigrants to the United States from 1899 to 1932, where immigration was initially unrestricted by law and then highly limited. Our panel of 39 countries includes data on occupations that immigrants had in their country of origin, providing a more accurate skill measure than previously available datasets. We find that migration costs have a negative but skill-neutral effect on quantity of immigrants and an increase in output, measured as GDP per capita, has a positive effect on quantity and a negative effect on average skill level of immigrants, suggesting that the main channel by which changes in output affected the average skill level of migrants in that time period is through the easing or tightening of the liquidity constraints and not through the economic incentives as in previous models. Also, using migrants’ occupation in the United States as a measure of skills would lead to misleading conclusions.