Childhood, Well-Being and Fairness

Marie-Louise Leroux, Pierre Pestieau and Gregory Ponthiere

No 1763, GLO Discussion Paper Series from Global Labor Organization (GLO)

Abstract: This paper examines the design of optimal family policies when chil- dren have unequal needs (in terms of material goods and parental time), leading to heterogeneous preferences, and have parents with unequal de- grees of altruism. We examine the issue of interpersonal well-being com- parisons 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 de- rive 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 H31 I31 I38 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:glodps:1763

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