Childhood, Well-Being and Fairness

Marie-Louise Leroux, Pierre Pestieau and Gregory Ponthiere

No 13017, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: This paper examines the design of optimal family policies when children have unequal needs (in terms of material goods and parental time), leading to heterogeneous preferences, and have parents with unequal degrees of altruism. We examine the issue of interpersonal well-being comparisons between children by means of consumption-equivalent and time-equivalent indexes, and show that the conditions of existence of these equivalents — as well as their rankings across children — differ across the metric used. We also examine well-being comparisons across parents who differ in their children's preferences and in their altruism. Then, we derive the constrained egalitarian social optimum (where only children's well-being levels are equalized) and the double egalitarian social optimum (where both children's and parents' well-being are equalized). It is shown that the optimal allocation and the optimal family policy vary with the metric used for the measurement of children's well-being.

Keywords: childhood; well-being; heterogeneity; interpersonal comparisons; family policies (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D13 I31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ces:ceswps:_13017

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