Fertility and the Value of Life

Rodrigo Soares and Javier Birchenall

No 232, 2004 Meeting Papers from Society for Economic Dynamics

Abstract: This paper incorporates fertility and altruism into the ``value of life'' framework. Two dimensions of fertility and altruism are important in evaluating life expectancy and health related gains. First, child mortality can be very important in determining welfare in a context where individuals choose the number of children they have. Second, if altruism motivates fertility, life expectancy gains have a twofold effect: they directly increase utility via increased survival probabilities, and they increase utility via increased welfare of the offspring. We develop a manageable way to deal with value of life valuations when fertility choices are endogenous and individuals are altruistic towards their offspring. Calculations using U.S. data between 1965 and 1995 show that altruism and fertility can easily double the value of mortality reductions obtained using the traditional framework

Keywords: value of life; fertility; marginal willingness to pay; mortality (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I10 J13 J17 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2004
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea and nep-lab
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:red:sed004:232

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