The growth of nonmarital fertility, together with greatly increased divorce rates and an increased proportion of children living in femaleheaded households, has provoked considerable alarm about the demise of the traditional family and concern about potentially harmful effects on the well-being of women and children. In this paper, I briefly summarize recent attempts by myself and others to develop a coherent theoretical framework to integrate economic theories of fertility and marriage in order to better understand why the same men who play the breadwinner role within marriage may fail to support their children following a divorce or who, despite the “gains to marriage,” may prefer to father children out of wedlock rather than within marriage. I argue that such behaviors of men can be understood within a framework that takes into account the selfinterests of both men and women as they interact within a given sexual or marital match and as they interact in a broader “market” for sexual and marriage partners. At the level of a given match, the theory provides hypotheses about the determinants of voluntary child support by fathers who are divorced from or have never married the mother. It also suggests reasons why voluntary child support is likely to be inadequate and, consequently, provides some insight about the role of laws and administrative procedures designed to establish paternity, determine the size of childsupport awards, and enforce collection of awards. At the level of the market, under certain circumstances, theory produces results similar to those emphasized by William Wilson and Katherine Neckerman’s (1987) theory of outof-wedlock childbearing among the underclass.

The family is distinguished from other social institutions, such as firms, by its crucial role in the production and nurture of children and its rationale is ultimately to be found in the preferences of individuals for own children. Sexual reproduction means that the production of one's own child requires the participation of another person of the opposite sex. The production of a child who will survive, become a successful adult, and produce his or her own children requires the expenditure of both personal and purchased resources over a lengthy period of time. Although interesting insights on the family can be culled from the classics, systematic development of the economics of the family is a recent phenomenon, beginning in the late 1950's when Harvey Leibenstein (1957) and Gary Becker (1960) attempted to address the determinants of fertility behavior within the framework of consumer theory. In this paper, I provide a brief overview of the history of family economics since 1960 and, along the way, offer a selective assessment of what has been learned from it. I attempt this assessment by asking how far we have progressed in answering a few of the larger theoretical, empirical, and policy questions that have motivated economists' interests in an area customarily studied by sociologists and demographers, or that have caused economists dealing with more traditional subject matter to incorporate the family into their work. Among the set of questions that have been addressed within the literature during the past twenty-five years are: 1) What are the causes of the historical association between economic growth and development and demographic transition from high to low levels of fertility and mortality? Of what relevance is the historical experience of currently developed countries to contemporary LDCs? Should fertility reduction be a primary goal of policy in the developing countries? Are the developed countries in danger of extinction because of fertility below replacement levels? 2) What was the cause of the post-World War II and subsequent bust? Was the baby boom a one-time aberration from a secular decline in fertility, or can we expect substantial fluctuations in the birth rate in the future? What are the consequences of the baby boom for the economic welfare of cohorts born during and after the boom? 3) Is the traditional family dead in the United States and other developed countries? Why did the divorce rate double in a decade? Why the growth in female-headed households? Why do so many divorced fathers fail to support their children? Has the sexual division of labor within the family changed as a consequence of the growth of female labor supply? To what extent are these changes in the family caused by social policy, and to what extent are they a product of basic market forces associated with modern economic development? What are the consequences of these changes for the welfare of future generations? I attempt to touch on some issues from each of the three areas in which the questions are grouped. However, constraints imposed by limitations of space, time, and most imtDiscussants: Kenneth Wolpin, Ohio State University; Robert Pollak, University of Pennsylvania; T. Paul Schultz, Yale University.

In 1960, marriage was a virtual precondition for childbearing. By 1997, out‐of‐wedlock births accounted for 26 percent of fertility among whites and 69 percent among blacks. This paper presents a model that integrates economic theories of fertility and marriage to help understand the growth of out‐of‐wedlock childbearing. In the theory, fathers can shift the costs of child rearing to single mothers. If females are in excess supply and have sufficiently high incomes, a marriage market equilibrium may exist in which children are born within marriage to high‐income parents, whereas in low‐income groups men father children by multiple partners outside of marriage.

Abs tract This paper proposes an econometric methodology to deal with life cycle earnings and mobility among discrete earnings classes. First, we use panel data on male log earnings to estimate an earnings function with permanent and serially correlated transitory components due to both measured and unmeasured variables. Assuming that the error components are normally distributed, we develop statements for the probability that an individual's earnings will fall into a particular but arbitrary time sequence of poverty states. Using these statements, we illustrate the implications of our earnings model for poverty dynamics and compare our approach to Markov chain models of income mobility. *Thls draft supersedes an earlier version of this paper which was

A structural model of the demand for college attendance is derived from the theory of comparative advantage and recent statistical models of self-selection and unobserved components. Estimates from NBEr-Thorndike data strongly support the theory. First, expected lifetime earnings gains influence the decision to attend college. Second, those who did not attend college would have earned less than measurably similar people who did attend, while those who attended college would have earned less as high school graduates than measurably similar people who stopped after high school. Positive selection in both groups implies no "ability bias" in these data.

Preliminary; not for quotation. NBER working papers are distributed informally and in limited number for comments only. They should not be quoted without written permission of the author. This report has not undergone the review accorded official NBER publications; in particular, it has not yet been submitted for apprbva1 by the Board of Directors. *This research was supported by the National Bureau of Economic Research. Thanks are due to Sean Becketti for excellent research assistance and to Lung Fei Lee for advice on statistical issues. The order of the authors ' names was selected by a random device.