Children, health, and environment: Some economics of the effect of the environment on children's health

Many environmental hazards pose significant health risks to children, often higher risks than they might pose to adults. Children's health is directly related to their future economic prospects and welfare in adult life. Improving children's health is, thus, a matter of great interest with important economic consequences. Despite the environmental health risks faced by children and their economic costs of reduced child health, little is known about the economic benefits of child risk reduction.;This requires, first, an understanding of how children's welfare and choice are related. Young children cannot generally be regarded as decision-makers; their parents are effectively making decisions for them. It is therefore important to analyze the interactions that take place inside the household, explicitly taking into consideration the tradeoffs parents make for their children's well-being. The research that comprises this thesis concentrates on a much overlooked fact about the way decisions are made by individuals and households.;Individuals, as well as households, are proactive with regard to exogenous changes in their environment and their health risks. The models developed in this thesis recognize that individuals and households are able to self-protect. Two methodologies are employed to incorporate the analytical concept of self-protection: The first allows the household to reallocate resources internally. This is done by explicitly modeling intrahousehold allocation decisions. The second method of self-protection incorporates the concept of endogenous risk. Endogenous risk implies that parents are able to take actions that alter the probability that their children and they will suffer a loss.;The analytical tools developed are applied to three settings: the impact of exogenous contextual characteristics on parents' intrahousehold allocation choices and children health, the determinants of fetal development, and the effect of health risks from food pathogens on intrahousehold allocations and children health.;The most important result is that studies that do not take into account the effect of intrahousehold allocations are misspecified and potentially severely biased. All children and most adults live in households, which implies that they face tradeoffs and constraints in the household that need to be explicitly taken into account.