ABSTRACT

Economists, especially health and labor economists, have long studied trade-offs that families face in the decisions they make about childbearing and working. Therefore, they are quite used to thinking about work-family mismatch, a theme of this volume, as work-family trade-offs. Nearly all economic studies of the implications of family-work trade-offs for child health refer to the Grossman/Becker model of child health, child development, or, more generally, child quality (Becker, 1981; Grossman, 1972a, 1972b). Their central premise is that families produce child and adult health as part of a process of maximizing the welfare of the family. Families desire consumer goods and leisure, but they also care about the health of their members. Family members’ health is produced according to a production technology (production function) in which the outcome is health-broadly defined to encompass all aspects of development-and the inputs include purchased goods and services such as medical care and family members’ time. The Grossman/Becker model also recognizes that health evolves over time: Individuals begin life with a health endowment that is partly genetic in origin, and health at any age has a random component. Therefore, when modeling health and development at any age, it may be necessary to measure health status at earlier ages or lifetime environmental conditions.