Suchergebnisse

This paper applies a discrete choice version of the household production framework to assess parents' ex ante willingness to pay to reduce their child's victimization from bullying at school. Willingness to pay is estimated using a bivariate probit model and a unique panel of 595 families from the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development for 2000 to 2003. Empirical results find a statistically significant positive association between an elementary school child's bully victimization and parents' choice to change their child's school in the subsequent sample period. Parents' annual willingness to pay for reduced child bully victimization averages $130 and ranges from $54 for parents whose child was not bullied to $633 for parents whose child was bullied. Given current literature estimates of U.S. bullying prevalence and the cost and effectiveness of currently available anti-bullying programs, parental willingness to pay estimates suggest that U.S. households' net annual return on investments in elementary school bullying prevention programs could be substantial.

This article discusses issues involved in inferring the economic value of children's health from estimates of the value of adult health. A central theme is that if health benefit transfers across individuals are to be useful to policy makers, they must be founded on analytical as well as statistical commonalities. Whether the health benefits transfer issue is among adults or between adults and children, a vision that embeds the individual in a collective entity, such as a family with limited time and resources, can provide a common analytical structure having substantive economic content and able to accommodate varying measures of health. (JEL I, D1, Q2)

We use estimates of parents' discount rate, inferred from their decisions to treat their children's body burdens of lead, to test empirically a model of transmission of cognitive skills from parents to children. The development of a child's cognitive skills depends in part upon the specific environment in which the skills are nurtured. The parental discount rate serves as a theoretically well defined index for a broad array of nurturing investments in the child. We find that children whose parents have a lower estimated discount rate exhibit higher assessed cognitive skills.

A taxonomic discussion of some reasons why contingent market methods may often be a superior means of generating data with which to value nonmarket commodities. It is argued that: (1) economists have erred in viewing the situations these methods posit as necessarily fictional; (2) the data generated by the methods may, for nonmarketed goods & the activities with which they are associated, accord more closely with the conditions of received economic theory; (3) the methods can make it easier to remove the difficulties of estimation & interpretation introduced by confounding variables; & (4) they often permit one to deal more readily with phenomena that have not been in the range of historical experience. Nevertheless, whatever the advantages, a major disadvantage remains: until detailed analytical knowledge is acquired of the manner in which expectations are formed, there exists no way to refute empirical propositions established from contingent markets. The South Coast Air Basin experiment is mentioned, in which the bids obtained for clean air conformed fairly closely to the values implied in a residential property value study, suggesting that contingent valuations have a basis in the real decision processes of consumers. 2 Figures. AA.