Families in Macroeconomics
By Matthias Doepke, Michèle Tertilt. Social Science Research Network, 2016
165 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Much of macroeconomics is concerned with the allocation of physical capital, human capital, and labor over time and across people. The decisions on savings, education, and labor supply that generate these variables are made within families. Yet the family (and decision-making in families) is typically ignored in macroeconomic models. In this chapter, we argue that family economics should be an integral part of macroeconomics, and that accounting for the family leads to new answers to classic macro questions. Our discussion is organized around three themes. We start by focusing on short and medium run fluctuations, and argue that changes in family structure in recent decades have important repercussions for the determination of aggregate labor supply and savings. Next, we turn to economic growth, and describe how accounting for families is central for understanding differences between rich and poor countries and for the determinants of long-run development. We conclude with an analysis of the role of the family as a driver of political and institutional change.
Subfields: Accounting, Gender Studies, Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0a46273a99a070a54c4ef6e56e0cc3685c220d07
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Citations in the corpus
- The End of Economic Growth? Unintended Consequences of a Declining Population (2020, methodology): “Other papers emphasize a “warm-glow” effect in which parents care about the number of their offspring; for example, see De La Croix and Doepke (2003), Hock and Weil (2012), and Doepke and Tertilt (2016). Finally, many papers feature a quantity-quality tradeoff and assign a key role to education, oft”
- Gender inequality during the COVID-19 pandemic: Income, expenditure, savings, and job loss (2020, background): “If past experience can offer any guidance, women suffered lower unemployment rates than men in the Great Recession in the United States and their employment generally tends to be less cyclical than that of men (Hoynes, Miller, & Schaller, 2012; Doepke & Tertilt, 2016).”