Shoshana Grossbard

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Shoshana Grossbard, born October 23, 1948, is an American economist and professor emerita at San Diego State University. She works with several research networks and institutes, including the Family Inequality Network at the University of Chicago and fellowships at the Institute for the Study of Labor and the CESifo Institute. She started two important groups in the field of household economics: the journal Review of the Economics of the Household (founded in 2001, where she serves as editor-in-chief) and the Society of Economics of the Household (SEHO), which has held annual meetings since 2017.

Her main research areas are household economics, family economics, and the economics of marriage. She studied at the University of Chicago with renowned economists Gary Becker, James Heckman, and Jacob Mincer, and she was one of the early scholars to explore this field.

Grossbard treats marriages and cohabiting couples like small firms. In her view, spouses may hire each other to perform household tasks, a concept she calls Work-In-Household (WiHo). If husbands use their wives’ WiHo and pay them a low wage, this can be seen as exploitation. Her models describe interactions as non-cooperative, similar to standard labor-market games.

She has also addressed who should control the household. While some scholars argue that owners of the household’s capital should have more influence, Grossbard argues that those doing the household work should have more control over decisions.

Additionally, she was among the first to study how gender balance in the population affects families, including household distribution of work, work effort, fertility, and the choice between marriage and cohabitation. She found that changes in the sex ratio over time are linked to married women’s labor supply in the United States, with women tending to work more when there are relatively fewer men.