In 1987, when we began writing the first edition of The Economic Organization of the Household in earnest, there had been no attempt to gather the threads of the research and discussion on the economics of the family, weave them together, and present them as a whole cloth to either the undergraduate or beginning graduate student. Since then, a flood of research has been published in response to the trends in family behavior, some of which raised puzzling social policy questions. Simultaneously, a host of national cross-section and panel data sets that could be used to test hypotheses about family behavior became available.