A student of Gary Becker and James Heckman at the University of Chicago and of Jacob Mincer, she was one of the first economists to enter this research area.
In her theoretical approach she views marriages and cohabitating couples as firms, with spouses possibly hiring each other's work in household production, which she calls "Work-In-Household (WiHo)".
Legal ownership of the household is a question related to the analysis of marriages as firms.
[6] Grossbard is one of the first social scientists to have analyzed consequences of gender imbalance in sex ratio for intra-household distribution, labor supply, fertility and cohabitation.
[7][8] She has shown that variation in sex ratio over time is inversely related to married women's labor supply in the U.S.[9][10]