CORE DP 2026 / 08

Childhood, Well-Being and Fairness / Marie-Louise Leroux, Pierre Pestieau, Gregory Ponthiere 

> This paper examines the design of optimal family policies when children have unequal needs (in terms of material goods and parental time), leading to heterogeneous preferences, and have parents with unequal degrees of altruism. We examine the issue of interpersonal well-being comparisons between children by means of consumption-equivalent and time-equivalent indexes, and show that the conditions of existence of these equivalents - as well as their rankings across children - differ across the metric used. We also examine well-being comparisons across parents who differ in their childrenís preferences and in their altruism. Then, we derive the constrained egalitarian social optimum (where only childrenís well-being levels are equalized) and the double egalitarian social optimum (where both childrenís and parentsíwell-being are equalized). It is shown that the optimal allocation and the optimal family policy vary with the metric used for the measurement of childrenís well-being.