Journal of Socio-Economics 31 (2002) 1–2 Editorial Introduction to special issue on household and gender economics Shoshana Grossbard-Shechtman ∗ Department of Economics, San Diego State University, 5500 Campanile Drive, San Diego, CA 92182, USA Received 1 October 1999; accepted 1 October 2001 This issue contains three papers on household economics. These papers were submitted as a response to a call for papers that I widely circulated in the summer of 1999. The papers then underwent a double-blind refereeing process. Socio-economics encompasses all possible overlaps between economics and other social sciences such as sociology and psychology. The study of marriage, divorce, and child devel- opment has traditionally been considered as pertaining to sociology and social psychology, rather than to economics (see Grossbard-Shechtman, 2001b). Socio-economics now includes the study of marriage and family, after the New Home Economics pioneered by Mincer (1962, 1963) and Becker (1965) opened the door to this form of economic analysis. 1 The article by Kathleen Cloud included here follows the tradition of economic analyses of child rearing behavior started by Leibowitz (1974). Cloud integrates an economic perspective of parental investment in their children’s human capital with some recent literature outside of economics. She cites a variety of studies performed by non-economists that are of relevance to a macro-level analysis of the impact of parenting skills on economic development. For instance, economic development may benefit from greater encouragement of curiosity and verbal expres- sion, and a number of studies cited by Cloud indicate a major shift in maternal encouragement of these skills. One of her major conclusions is that if they are interested in understanding the creation and maintenance of human capital, economists need to pay more attention to the recent literature by non-economists that examines critical shifts in parental behavior. The article by Linda Welling and Marci Bearance addresses another aspect of parental behav- ior: the allocation of spending to goods they share with their child. Here the economic analysis is a theoretical analysis based on game theory. They compute and compare the outcomes under ∗ Tel.: +1-619-594-5468. E-mail address: sgrossba@mail.sdsu.edu (S. Grossbard-Shechtman). 1053-5357/02/$ – see front matter © 2002 Published by Elsevier Science Inc. PII:S1053-5357(01)00136-6