Alesina and Giuliano report:

The structure of family relationships influences economic behavior and attitudes. We define our measure of family ties using individual responses from the World Value Survey regarding the role of the family and the love and respect that children need to have for their parents for over 70 countries.  We show that strong family ties imply more reliance on the family as an economic unit which provides goods and services and less on the market and on the government for social insurance.  With strong family ties home production is higher, labor force participation of women and youngsters, and geographical mobility, lower.  Families are larger (higher fertility and higher family size) with strong family ties, which is consistent with the idea of the family as an important economic unit. We present evidence on cross country regressions.  To assess causality we look at the behavior of second generation immigrants in the US and we employ a variable based on the grammatical rule of pronoun drop as an instrument for family ties.  Our results overall indicate a significant influence of the strength of family ties on economic outcomes.

Here is the link.  This topic remains understudied by economists.  Biographically speaking, our political views often spring from our experience of our families and our views of what kind of family structure is acceptable.  That is partly why true Russian liberals are so hard to find, and also why Russians are not obsessed with the welfare state.  Libertarians tend to be family-ornery; compared to their conservative brethren, they are less willing to knuckle down and admit the morally binding power of irrational family obligations.

Addendum: Will Wilkinson has a good post on family.
 

Read the whole thing, it is called "Am I ruining economics or not?"  Of course Alex and I already have weighed in on the "no" side.  I am reminded of Jonathan Swift:

Censure is the tax a man pays to the public for being eminent.

Michael Kremer has another neat idea:

Most countries prohibit the export of certain antiquities.  This practice often leads to illegal excavation and looting for the black market, which damages the items and destroys important aspects of the archaeological record.  We argue that long-term leases of antiquities would raise revenue for the country of origin while preserving its long-term ownership rights.  By putting the object into the hands of the highest value consumer in each period, allowing leases would generate incentives for protection of objects.

I’m all for trying this, as I see no major downside.  But I don’t think it would have a large positive effect.  Collectors, being irrational creatures and "completists," wish to own rather than lease, even if the lease extends past their expected lifetimes.  Museum donors wish to fund museum acquisitions more than museum borrowings.  Similarly, it is much easier for a non-profit to raise money for buying a building than leasing one long-term.  So the demand for leased antiquities won’t be all that huge.

In "Freaks and Geeks" (April 2, 2007) Noam Scheiber praises my work with Alan Krueger on the economic effects of compulsory schooling but argues that economics Ph.D. students today are obsessed with headline-grabbing trivia of little substantive importance.  The root cause is said to be excessive attention to a good or clever research design at the expense of the relevance of the underlying question.  Scheiber’s story is engaging and he lands a few punches, but his account is misleading in two important ways.  For one thing, he exaggerates the problem of small-bore studies.  America’s half-dozen top Ph.D. programs produce scores of Ph.D. students every year.  Most of this work is still on traditional topics.  At MIT (where Levitt studied), we continue to supervise empirical theses on, among other things, health insurance, immigration, unions, and human capital.  High-quality research on these traditional topics gets students high-quality jobs.  I’ll plead guilty, however, to being especially pleased when students manage to come up with clean identification–that is, they have a convincing strategy for uncovering causal effects.  Clean identification is not a fetish; without it, little of value is learned.  On this score, our students typically do better than the empiricists of H.G. Lewis’s generation.  In two of the most dynamic empirical microeconomics subfields, the economics of education and economic development, there has been a virtual credibility revolution, with the increase of randomized field trials as well as compelling natural-experiments research designs (see, e.g., the work done at MIT’s Poverty Action Lab).

Second, in his rush to tar some up-and-comers with the "cute-o-nomics" brush, Scheiber misses a central feature of the clean-identification research agenda, best explained by example.  One of the enduring scientific and policy questions in Labor economics is the sensitivity of hours worked to changes in pay (this matters for tax policy, for example).  The best evidence labor economists have on the relation between wages and hours worked comes from a small experiment (by Ernst Fehr and Lorenz Goette) involving the wages of bicycle messengers in Switzerland.  The second best comes from a study of stadium vendors by Gerald Oettinger.  Who cares about the riders of Veloblitz or snack sellers at Camden Yards?  We care because economics is predicated on the notion that a few simple principles explain behavior in many settings.  These studies produce results that are convincing and may well be general, though, as always in science, it will take replication to know for sure.  Some of the studies Scheiber dismisses can be understood in this spirit.  Finally, as to the merits of Freakonomics the book: My 17-year old daughter picked it up on her own last year.  She never knew economics could be so cool.  Even better, she now asks me what I’m up to.  So I tip my cap to Dubner and Levitt–I hope to see many of their readers in an economics classroom some day.

JOSHUA ANGRIST is a professor of economics at Massachusetts Institute

That is from TNR on-line.  Here is Alex’s earlier post on the Scheiber piece.