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SEX RATIOS, POLYGYNY, AND THE VALUE OF WOMEN IN MARRIAGE––A BECKERIAN APPROACH

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 March 2015

Shoshana Grossbard
Shoshana Grossbard*
Affiliation:
San Diego State University, USA
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Extract

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).

Keywords

Marriageeconomic analysismarriage marketsex ratiopolygamybridepricedowry
Type
Special Section: Essays in honor of Gary Becker
Information
Journal of Demographic Economics , Volume 81 , Issue 1 , March 2015 , pp. 13 - 25
Copyright
Copyright © Université catholique de Louvain 2015 

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References

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