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Economics of Child Well-Being

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Handbook of Child Well-Being

Abstract

This chapter presents an integrated economic approach that organizes and interprets the evidence on child development. It also discusses the indicators of child well-being that are used in international comparisons. Recent evidence on child development is summarized, and policies to promote child well-being are discussed. The chapter concludes with some open questions and suggestions for future research.

This research was supported in part by the American Bar Foundation, the Children’s Initiative, a Project of the Pritzker Family Foundation, the Buffett Early Chilhood Fund, NICHD R37HD065072, R01HD54702, a grant to the Human Capital and Economic Opportunity Global Working Group, an initiative of the Becker Friedman Institute for Research in Economics funded by the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET), and an anonymous funder. We acknowledge the support of a European Research Council grant hosted by University College Dublin, DEVHEALTH 269874. The views expressed in this paper are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the funders or persons named here. We thank Zidi Chen for excellent research assistance and Pietro Biroli for help with the ALSPAC data.

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Conti, G., Heckman, J.J. (2014). Economics of Child Well-Being. In: Ben-Arieh, A., Casas, F., Frønes, I., Korbin, J. (eds) Handbook of Child Well-Being. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-9063-8_21

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