Volume 31, Number 3 (Summer) 1996
Agee, Mark D., and Thomas D. Crocker. 1996. "Parental Altruism and Child Lead Exposure: Inferences from the Demand for Chelation Therapy." Journal of Human Resources 31(3):677-691.
We
use parents’ decisions to treat their children’s body burdens of lead
to infer parental ex ante willingness to pay for reduced burdens. Willingness to pay is estimated
with a data set containing 256 observations; the data were originally gathered to assess the impact
of children’s body lead burdens upon their intellectual and behavioral development. Our results
indicate that parental ex ante willingness to pay for a 1 percent reduction in child body lead
burden exceeds the estimated ex post savings in medical treatment and compensatory education costs
caused by the same reduction.
Mark D Agee is an assistant professor of economics at the Pennsylvania State University Altoona. Thomas D. Crocker is a professor of economics at the University of Wyoming, Laramie. Comments by Scott Atkinson, Joni Hersch, R. Mark Wilson, and two anonymous referees are gratefully acknowledged. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency provided partial financial support. Data used in this paper are available from the authors upon request.
© 2002 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System
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