Robert A. Pollak

How do parents allocate human capital among their children? To what extent do parental decisions about resource allocation determine children's eventual economic success? The analyses in this text explore these questions by developing and testing a model in which the earnings of children with different genetic endowments respond differently to investments in human capital. Behrman, Pollak and Taubman use this model to investigate issues such as: parental bias in resource allocations based on gender or birth order; the extent of intergenerational mobility in income, earnings and schooling in the United States; the relative importance of environmental and genetic factors in determining variations in schooling; and whether parents' distributions offset the intended effects of government programmes designed to subsidize children. In allocating scarce resources, parents face a trade-off between equity and efficiency, between the competing desires to equalize the wealth of their children and to maximize the sum of their earnings.

How do parents allocate human capital among their children? To what extent do parental decisions about resource allocation determine children's eventual economic success? The analyses in this text explore these questions by developing and testing a model in which the earnings of children with different genetic endowments respond differently to investments in human capital. Behrman, Pollak, and Taubman use this model to investigate issues such as parental bias in resource allocations based on gender or birth order; the extent of intergenerational mobility in income, earnings, and schooling in the United States; the relative importance of environmental and genetic factors in determining variations in schooling; and whether parents' distributions offset the intended effects of government programmes designed to subsidize children. In allocating scarce resources, parents face a trade-off between equity and efficiency, between the competing desires to equalize the wealth of their children and to maximize the sum of their earnings.

This is a collection of papers by leading theorist Robert A Pollak - four of them previously unpublished - exploring the theory of the cost of living index. The unifying theme of these papers is that, when suitably elaborated, the theory of the cost of living index provides principled answers to many of the practical problems that arise in constructing consumer price indexes. In addition to Pollak's classic paper The Theory of the Cost of Living Index, the volume includes papers on subindexes, the intertemporal cost of living index, welfare comparisons and equivalence scales, the social cost of living index, the treatment of `quality', and consumer durables in the cost of living index.