Introduction to A Theory of the Allocation of Time by Gary Becker.

Abstract

Gary Becker's classic study, ‘A theory of the allocation of time’, laid the analytical foundations for the study of household production and the allocation of time within the household. It spawned a large literature and continues to influence economics and other social sciences. The article was written when Becker was in his mid-30s, teaching at Columbia University and conducting research at the National Bureau of Economic Research, then headquartered in New York. Over the period 1958–69, Becker, along with Jacob Mincer, organised the legendary Columbia Labour Economics Workshop. Becker, Mincer and their students applied price theory to study the economics of fertility, labour supply, income inequality, education, on-the-job training, crime and punishment and the theory of irrational behaviour, among other topics. The interplay between theory and data was the hallmark of that group. From this crucible emerged the modern theory of human capital (Becker, ,) and important components of the modern economics of the family that were distilled and extended in Becker's classic A Treatise on the Family (1981, enlarged in 1991). A generation of productive and influential scholars was trained at Columbia during this period (Heckman, 2014). In his introduction to this article, Becker discusses the body of research on the economics of time that was being conducted at Columbia, to which he contributed and from which he had drawn. This article is the analytical synthesis of a body of ideas developed in that intense intellectual climate. Many scholars have tried to disentangle the contributions of Jacob Mincer from those of Gary Becker during the period of their synergistic collaboration. Attempts to do so miss the highly interactive and mutually supportive intellectual environment of the Columbia group and the ability of Becker to create clean analytical insights from diverse bodies of empirical work and to stimulate all those around him.