Gary Becker - Nobel Memorial Prize

Nobel Memorial Prize

According to the Prize in Economic Sciences citation, his work can be categorized into four areas:

  • investments in human capital
  • behavior of the family (or household), including distribution of work and allocation of time in the family
  • crime and punishment
  • discrimination on the markets for labor and goods.

Becker's lecture, "Nobel Lecture: The Economic Way of Looking at Behavior", subsequently published in the Journal of Political Economy, reviews his four key areas of research. He explains that his framework of analysis is not a traditional self-interested motivation but an analysis based on a set of assumptions and individual preferences. Agents are maximizing welfare, which is based on individual conception constrained by income, time, and imperfect memory and calculation capabilities. Much of his research focuses on the impact of the rising value of time as a result of economic growth.

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