Children Costs in a One-Adult Household: Empirical Evidence from the UK

Anderson VIL

2024

Abstract

This paper addresses two critical questions for family and economic policy. Are estimates of the cost of children based on two-parent households generalizable to single-parent families? Does the "two-child limit" policy—restricting family benefits to low-income parents with a maximum of two children—contribute to child poverty? In this paper, I extend the collective consumption model to one-adult households and apply it to data from the Family Expenditure Survey (FES) in the UK and present two key findings. First, child cost estimates derived from two-parent households tend to underestimate by 5.3 percentage points those incurred by single parents due to significant structural differences between these households. Second, in low-income families, household size plays a crucial role in determining the proportion of resources allocated to children, a factor less relevant for higher-income families. This suggest that the "two-child limit" policy would likely exacerbate inequalities within larger families.

Bibtex

@article{article1,
  author    = {Anderson VIL},
  title     = {Children Costs in a One-Adult Household: Empirical Evidence from the UK. THEMA Working Paper n°2022-21 
},
  abstract  = {This paper addresses two critical questions for family and economic policy. Are estimates of the cost of children based on two-parent households generalizable to single-parent families? Does the "two-child limit" policy—restricting family benefits to low-income parents with a maximum of two children—contribute to child poverty? In this paper, I extend the collective consumption model to one-adult households and apply it to data from the Family Expenditure Survey (FES) in the UK and present two key findings. First, child cost estimates derived from two-parent households tend to underestimate by 5.3 percentage points those incurred by single parents due to significant structural differences between these households. Second, in low-income families, household size plays a crucial role in determining the proportion of resources allocated to children, a factor less relevant for higher-income families. This suggest that the "two-child limit" policy would likely exacerbate inequalities within larger families.
},
  pages     = {1--48},
  year      = {2024},
  biburl    = {https://thema.u-cergy.fr/IMG/pdf/2022-21.pdf},
}