Introducing Volume 2 of Celebrating the Life and Work of Gary Becker

I am happy to introduce the second volume of the Journal of Human Capital ’s special issue celebrating the life and work of Gary Becker. The first volume, published in the JHC last year (Summer 2018, vol. 12, no. 2), contains a collection of papers that were presented in a conference held at the Becker-Friedman Institute at the University of Chicago on October 16, 2015. We are gratified by the favorable reactionsmany of our readers have expressed about that volume, which focused largely on the central contribution of Gary Becker to economics—his seminal work on the role of investment in, and the accumulation of, human capital as a productive asset, which Becker believed to be as important as, if not more important than, the role of physical capital in the economy. The papers and web supplements appearing in that volume (https://www.journals.uchicago.edu /toc/jhc/2018/12/2) constitute just the “first serving” of the journal’s celebration of Becker’s life and work. As I noted at the end of my introduction to the first volume, the JHC had received almost as many equally meritorious papers from Becker’s long-time colleagues and students that could not be included in the 2015 conference and the first volume because of time and space constraints. These papers, which are presented in this volume, thus constitute the “second serving” of our celebration. Indeed, the second serving of the celebration of Becker’s life and work may be even more exciting, as it includes a surprise—a wonderful contribution by Gary Becker to his own memorial celebration! The article “Preference Formation within Families” by Gary S. Becker, dated 1992, is not a submission we received from another world. It is a current discovery by Guity Nashat Becker, Gary’s wife, with the help of a number of Gary’s students, in one of the many drawers and storage compartments at Gary’s home study. The article was foundwith a treasure trove of other unpublished papers Gary had written. Fortunately, three of these students, Julio Elías, Kevin Murphy, and Casey Mulligan, have un-