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| ECM-2003-01 : Do Children Matter? An Examination of Gender Differences in Environmental Valuation |  |
| You can download this working paper in PDF format (248.81K). |
| By:
Dupont, D. | |
| This paper is concerned with the role played by children in a household on choice behaviour related to willingness-to-pay (WTP) for environmental improvements. This paper uses data from a contingent valuation framework to examine a hypothesis from the social psychology literature; namely, the presence of a gender valuation gap that results in a higher willingness to pay for environmental improvements by women with children, as compared to the willingness to pay by men with children. A secondary hypothesis examines whether individuals with children have different expressed values when compared to childless individuals. Estimated WTP functions are shown to be statistically different for four groups of individuals: women with children, men with children, women without children, and men without children. While taste parameters relating to expressed concern for the environment are statistically different, mean WTP values from the estimation do not reveal statistically significant differences in spite of large differences in each group's mean values. Results do show, however, that women with children are more likely to pay for programs that are more likely to reduce exposure to harmful contaminants. The paper concludes with a discussion of some implications for policy analysis when important gender and children effects are ignored in environmental public goods valuation | |
Keywords: Children, CVM, environmental valuation, gender, WTP
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