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Whether or not they provide subjective satisfaction to providers, unpaid services and non-market transfers typically contribute positively to total output, living standards, and the social climate. This essay describes some quantitative dimensions of care provision and reviews their implications for the measurement of economic growth and the explanation of relative earnings, including the gender wage differential. It also calls attention to under-explored aspects of collective conflict over legal rules and public policies that shape the distribution of the net costs of care provision.

We examine the relative pay of occupations involving care, such as teaching, counseling, providing health services, or supervising children. We use panel data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth covering workers between 17 and 35 years of age. Care work pays less than other occupations after controlling for the education and employment experience of the workers, many occupation and industry characteristics, and (via individual fixed effects) unmeasured, stable characteristics of those who hold the jobs. Both men and women in care work pay this relative wage penalty. However, more women than men pay the penalty, since more women than men do this kind of work.

This paper explores the implications for economic analysis, societal well-being, and public policy of the movement of care services (such as child and elder care) from home to market. A broad empirical overview sets the stage for the argument that this process cannot be properly evaluated using only a priori judgments about the suitability of marketization. The context in which markets operate is crucial, and while the growth of market provision poses some risks, it also offers some potential benefits.

Claudia Goldin richly deserves the Prize for Economic Sciences awarded to her in 2023. Here, Folbre summarizes her most important contributions and explains some significant limitations of her theoretical perspective.

This essay offers a new way of visualizing structures of collective power based on gender, emphasizing the role of social institutions in shaping women’s ability to bargain over the distribution of the gains from cooperation with men. It makes the case for an interdisciplinary conceptualization of bargaining power that emphasizes the role of imperfect information and inefficient outcomes, and explains important parallels between structures of collective power based on gender, age, and sexuality, and those based on other dimensions of socially assigned group membership such as race, ethnicity, citizenship, and class. Recognition of the importance of reproductive work helps advance the project of developing intersectional political economy.

This case study in the evolution of heterodox economics describes the emergence of feminist perspectives on care provision and their implications for a larger theory of bargaining over the distribution of gains from cooperation. It testifies to the hybrid vigor of diverse and ongoing efforts to challenge the narrow focus of the neoclassical paradigm.

The time we have to care for one another, especially for our children and our elderly, is more precious to us than anything else in the world. Yet we have more experience accounting for money than we do for time. In this volume, leading experts in analysis of time use from across the globe explore the interface between time use and family policy. The contributors: * show how social institutions limit the choices that individuals can make about how to divide their time between paid and unpaid work * challenge conventional surveys that offer simplistic measures of time spent in childcare or elder care * summarize empirical evidence concerning trends in time devoted to the care of family members * debate ways of assigning a monetary value to this time. This informative and enlightening book is well researched, well thought through and well written. An important read for students of feminist economics, sociology and gender studies, the contributors here argue that time is not money, in fact time is more important than money. Introduction Part 1: The Big Picture 1. The Misallocation of Time 2. Time Use and Public Policy Part 2: Using the Yardstick of Time to Capture Care 3. Proximity, or Responsibility?: Measuring Parental Child Care Time 4. Making the Invisible Visible: The Life and Time(s) of Informal Caregivers Part 3: Valuing Child Care and Elder Care 5. Bringing Up Bobby and Betty: The Inputs and Outputs of Child Care Time 6. Valuing Informal Elder Care Part 4: Parenting, Employment and the Pressures of Care 7. Packaging Care: What Happens When Children Receive Non-Parental Care? 8. Parenting and Employment: What Time-Use Surveys Show 9. The Rush Hour: The Quality of Time and Gender Equity Part 5: International Comparisons 10. Dual Earner Families in Four Countries 11. Parenthood Without Penalty Nancy Folbre is Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and staff economist with the Centre for Popular Economics. Amongst other books she has written is Who Pays for the Kids? also published by Routledge. Michael Bittman is Senior Research Fellow at the University of New South Wales, Australia, chair of the United Nations Expert Group on Time-Use Surveys and co-author (with Jocelyn Pixley) of The Double Life of the Family .

Much of the economic literature on families is couched within a neoclassical framework based on individual optimization. This framework treats familial altruism, like other tastes and preferences, as exogenously given and focuses on household responses to changes in prices and incomes. Altruism is considered rare outside the family, where self-interest undermines the potential for collective action. An alternative approach, influenced by feminist theory, places more emphasis on self-interest within the home. Considerable evidence suggests that parents in the now-developed countries once enjoyed important economic benefits from child-rearing, not only because children began to work at an early age, but also because parental control over assets such as family farms gave them leverage over adult children. Similar factors contribute to high fertility in many developing countries today. Numerous aspects of the issue of children as public goods are addressed in detail.