When Jacob Mincer and Gary Becker started the New Home Economics (NHE) at Columbia University in the early 1960s, they expanded on the field of family and consumption economics that Hazel Kirk and Margaret Reid began in the early 1920s. This paper studies forty years of household economics, the decisions that household members make regarding any allocation of resources. These decisions may regard consumption, labor supply, transportation, fertility, or health. A review of the history of the NHE shows that Jacob Mincer's original contribution tends to be underestimated. This paper also argues that the growth of the NHE benefited from the concentration of talent at Columbia, organizational support, the diversity of a student body that included many talented women, the ideological commitments that students, many of them married, had for the study of home production, a departmental policy de-emphasizing gender-related politics, and relatively high levels of civility.
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Article provided by Taylor and Francis Journals in its journal Feminist Economics.
Volume (Year): 7 (2001) Issue (Month): 3 (November) Pages: 103-130 Download reference. The following formats are available: HTML
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References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Arleen Leibowitz, 1974.
"Home Investments in Children,"
NBER Chapters,
in: Marriage, Family, Human Capital, and Fertility, pages 111-135
National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
[Downloadable!]
Arleen Leibowitz, 1974.
"Home Investments in Children,"
NBER Chapters,
in: Economics of the Family: Marriage, Children, and Human Capital, pages 432-456
National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
[Downloadable!]
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