As Generation X’s (born in the 1960s and 1970s) child bearing years draw to a close, its parenting practices are due for assessment, the topic of the book under review. The book organizes its discussion around Diana Baumrind’s three parenting styles: authoritarian, permissive, and authoritative. It chronicles the drift toward the two latter and argues that income inequality determines which one of the two will be popular. When inequality is low, less is at stake and the parenting style can be more relaxed. By contrast, high inequality pushes parents toward the achievement- oriented authoritative style. More generally, the book argues, cultural differences in parenting styles can be understood as the outcome of altruistic parents’ efforts to prepare their children for adulthood, a useful perspective when parental rights are limited, long the case in the West.

Preference for sons over daughters is widespread in many Asian countries, for example, India, China, and South Korea. This paper models endogenous sex choice and shows that unbalanced sex ratios are but one of several possible consequences of a preference for sons. In particular, if parents want children who reproduce, nonrandom mating may cause women to be consistently born into low‐status families and thus relegated to a permanent underclass. The paper also discusses possible links between son preference and marriage patterns such as spousal age gaps, hypergamy (women marrying up), caste endogamy, and cousin marriages.

Using estate tax returns data, we observe that the share of women among the very wealthy in the United States peaked in the late 1960s at nearly one-half and then declined to one-third. We argue that this pattern reflects changes in the importance of dynastic wealth, with the share of women proxying for inherited wealth. If so, wealth mobility decreased until the 1970s and rose thereafter. Such an interpretation is consistent with technological change driving long-term trends in mobility and inequality, as well as the recent divergence between top wealth and top income shares documented elsewhere.

Prostitution is low-skill, labor intensive, female, and well paid. This paper proposes a marriage market explanation to this puzzle. If a prostitute compromises her marriage market prospects, she will have to be compensated for forgone marriage market opportunities. We discuss the link between poverty and prostitution and show that prostitution may decrease with male income if wives and prostitutes are drawn from the same pool of women. We point to the role of male sex ratios, and males in transit, in sustaining high levels of prostitution, and we discuss possible reasons for its low reputation and implications for marriage patterns.

Individual versus Parental Consent in Marriage: Implications for Intra-Household Resource Allocation and Growth by Lena Edlund and Nils-Petter Lagerlöf. Published in volume 96, issue 2, pages 304-307 of American Economic Review, May 2006

We use prenatal exposure to Chernobyl fallout in Sweden as a natural experiment inducing variation in cognitive ability. Students born in regions of Sweden with higher fallout performed worse in secondary school, in mathematics in particular. Damage is accentuated within families (i.e., siblings comparison) and among children born to parents with low education. In contrast, we detect no corresponding damage to health outcomes. To the extent that parents responded to the cognitive endowment, we infer that parental investments reinforced the initial Chernobyl damage. From a public health perspective, our findings suggest that cognitive ability is compromised at radiation doses currently considered harmless.

Since the introduction of the one-child policy in China in 1979, many more boys than girls have been born, foreshadowing a sizable bride shortage. What do young men unable to find wives do? This paper focuses on criminality, an asocial activity that has seen a marked rise since the mid-1990s. Exploiting province-year level variation, we find an elasticity of crime with respect to the sex ratio of 16- to 25-year-olds of 3.4, suggesting that male sex ratios can account for one-seventh of the rise in crime. We hypothesize that adverse marriage market conditions drive this association.