Viewpoint: Child research comes of age

Abstract

the usual focus on education as a measure of human capital, researchers are focusing on a wide variety of other factors that will affect the earnings, health, and well-being of children when they become adults. Research on child abuse, child labor, child care, child support, child health, youth employment, intergenerational relationships, and social programs affecting children has all become relatively commonplace. This observation suggests that research on AFamilies and Children @ (to use the name of the new program at the National Bureau of Economic Research) is finally coming of age. The first two sections of this paper discuss some theoretical and empirical motivations for the upswing of interest in this topic. The next two sections give examples of work that has been done, or perhaps could be done, using existing Canadian data sets. Empirical research is by its nature data driven, so the last section offers some observations about the data and concludes that the best way for Canadian governments to increase the volume of high-quality research on families and children would be to increase researchers = access to data. This paper is not intended as a survey, though many specific papers will be cited as examples. Theoretical Motivations for Research on Children There is increasing evidence that models of the household in which everyone has the same preferences (Samuelson, 1956) or in which a household dictator makes all the decisions (Becker, 1991) are not accurate descriptions of life within the household. McElroy (1990) suggested that if negotiations between household members were 1 unimportant, than outside factors that influenced bargaining power within the household (Adistribution

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