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Rating: 
Summary: An Outstanding Contribution
Review: This is an outstanding book, one that economists and other social scientists interested in household behavior will find extremely interesting. It is a collection of six lectures on a variety of "economics of the family" topics. In most cases, Stark provides new and very intriguing ways of explaining household behavior. For example, we often observe adults giving money to their elderly parents. Why? Conventional explanations include altruism (people care about their parents) and "exchange" (money is given in exchange for services, e.g., elderly parents are taking care of grandchildren). Stark suggests an alternative explanation: people give money to parents to "demonstrate" the appropriate behavior to their own children. The hope is that the children will, in turn, transfer money to the parents once they become adults. This hypothesis generates testable predictions, and empirical work supporting these predictions is also presented.Other topics Stark addresses include the reasons for investments in human capital (which may be linked to the timing of expected bequests), the motivation for remittances by migrants, the reasons why migrants may do better (e.g., in the labor market) than native born workers, and other. Again and again, Stark suggests new and interesting ways of thinking about these issues. Most chapters contain "technical" sections that readers without graduate training in economics are unlikely to be able to follow. In all cases, however, the main points are also explained in plain English, so that even the non-initiated can understand the arguments and gain much from reading the book.
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