About Professor Grossbard (as of November 2007)

• Short Bio
• About Professor Grossbard’s Non-Unitary Models of the Households
• Lectures and Research-Related Visits, 2007
• Scheduled Lectures, 2008

Short Bio

Shoshana Grossbard is professor of economics at San Diego State University, founding editor of the Review of Economics of the Household published by Springer, and an IZA fellow. She has been visiting scholar at CES in Munich, Columbia University, UCSD, and Bar Ilan University; visiting collaborator at Princeton University; fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford; and has taught economics and sociology at Tel Aviv University. She obtained her Ph.D. in 1978 from the University of Chicago, where she learned the New Home Economics from its founders, Gary Becker and Jacob Mincer and as a student developed her first non-unitary model of household decision-making. She has published 5 books and more than 50 articles on the determinants of marriage and labor supply and on the law and economics of household decisions. Her books include: “On the Economics of Marriage, a Theory of Marriage, Labor, and Divorce” (1993), “Jacob Mincer, a Pioneer of Modern Labor Economics” (2006) “Marriage and the Economy, Theory and Evidence from Advanced Industrialized Societies” (Cambridge University Press, 2003), and “The Expansion of Economics” (co-edited with Christopher Clague, M.E. Sharpe, 2002). She has presented her work in many universities in the U.S.A. and at universities in Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Israel, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Sweden, Taiwan, and the U.K. She is fluent in English, French, Hebrew, Spanish, and Dutch.

Prof. Grossbard’s Non-Unitary Household Models

In 1975, while working with Gary Becker on her doctoral dissertation on the economics of polygamy, she developed what is probably the first non-unitary model of household decision-making. She assumed that men and women have opposite preferences about the number of wives in their household and inferred what all non-unitary models predict: the more resources individuals have in marriage, the more they are likely to get their way. (see Grossbard 1976; Grossbard-Shechtman 1993).

Her model built on two aspects of Becker’s economic analysis of marriage (JPE, 1973).  First, she used one of his Demand & Supply models. However, unlike Becker, and his earlier students Alan Freiden and Michael Keeley, she used not only a market’s quantity dimension (the number of marriages) but also its price dimension (see Grossbard 1978). Second, she adopted Becker’s idea that working in marriage is an occupation that has a wage. However, she could not possibly follow Becker in assuming that this wage is set in competitive labor markets, as she was studying couples in 1973 in a part of Nigeria where most women never entered the labor force. She then developed her own Demand & Supply model that has more in common with standard Demand & Supply analysis of labor markets than with Becker’s theory of marriage. She assumed that women’s work in marital home production has a supply (by women) and a demand (by men), that competitive markets establish a ‘quasi-wage’ for work in marital household production, and that this quasi-wage includes benefits that husbands provide to wives in exchange for work in household production. She then modeled a smaller number of co-wives as one of these benefits. The predictions that followed: women with more resources such as optimal age and education are likely to have fewer co-wives; men with more resources such as education and wealth are likely to have more wives. These predications were tested in the first econometric study of polygamy, using Nigerian data.

In Grossbard-Shechtman (1984) she expanded her non-unitary model of married individuals as household production workers and employers to cases in which both husband and wife work in household production and mostly derived testable predictions regarding the effects of individual resources and sex ratios on labor supply decisions. Other intra-household allocation decisions, such as consumption and fertility, are mentioned briefly.

Grossbard-Shechtman (1993), Chapter 4, contains ideas she had presented at the PAA meetings in 1981 (available upon request) and that include predictions regarding the effects of individual resources and sex ratios on individual orchestration power within the household, which includes decisions regarding intra-household allocation of goods.
(references can be found on her c.v. and list of publications)

Lectures and Research-Related Visits, 2007

• February 20-21, consultations at the Aarhus School of Business, Denmark
• February 22, presentation at the Swedish Institute for Social Research, Stockholm University, Sweden
• February 26, presentation at the Institute of Social and Economic Research, ISER, University of Essex, U.K.
• March 6 to 20, visit at CES-ifo, Munich, Germany, including presentation of three lectures on the economics of marriage.
• March 15, presentation at the Department of Economics, University of Warsaw, Poland.
•  July 26 to August 9, visiting scholar at IZA, Bonn, Germany.
• August 2, presentation at the National Institute of Social Research, Copenhagen, Denmark.

 Lectures and Research-Related Visits, 2008

• February 4, presentation at Seminar on Gender, Paris 1/Sorbonne
• February 6 and 7, six-hour workshop on Economic Analyses of Marriage and presentation at the III Workshop on Economics of the Family, University of Zaragoza, Spain
• February 11, 14, 18,  21, 25, and 28, twelve-hour mini-course on Economic Analyses of Marriage at the Ecole Normale Superieure (Paris-Jourdan) and the Sorbonne (Paris 1).
• March 2-17, visiting scholar at Bar-Ilan University, Israel