Focus on Babies: Evidence on Parental Attitudes Towards Pesticide Risks

Kelly Maguire (), Nicole Owens and Nathalie Simon

No 200402, NCEE Working Paper Series from National Center for Environmental Economics, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency

Abstract: Studies that estimate the benefits of reduced environmental exposure typically assume that individuals know the true magnitude of the risk reduction. However, the accuracy of risk perception assumptions may be questionable. This issue has not been resolved with respect to adult risk reductions and becomes even more complicated when considering risk reductions to small children. We report results from focus groups with parents of small children regarding their risk perceptions over organic and conventional babyfood. Our results yield surprisingly consistent results between scientific and perceived risks. Previous literature reports a scientific risk reduction estimate of 1.98 per million, reflecting the reduced risk of death from cancer by avoiding pesticides in foods during the first year of life. The results from our focus groups show that parents estimate that the median risk reduction ranges from 1 to 8 per million, depending on specific demographic characteristics. Individuals with less than a four-year college degree provide the highest estimates, while women, those with more education and purchasers of organic babyfood provide lower estimates. We use these results to estimate parental willingness to pay for pesticide risk reductions to their children. Results show that parents in our focus groups who purchase organic babyfood express a value of a statistical cancer of approximately $9 million. These results provide a lower bound on the estimate for the value of reduced cancer risk from pesticide exposure in the first year of life.

Keywords: risk perceptions; children's health; health valuation; organic foods (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 32 pages
Date: 2004-03, Revised 2004-03
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.epa.gov/environmental-economics/workin ... es-towards-pesticide First version, 2004 (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nev:wpaper:wp200402

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NCEE Working Paper Series from National Center for Environmental Economics, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Cynthia Morgan ().