Agency in family policy : a survey

Given that a child's birth and lifetime earning capacity are the result of actions undertaken by the child's own parents, if the government has an interest in the welfare or tax-paying capacity of its future citizens, it has no option but to condition the decisions of its present citizens. Parents are then, in the ordinary sense of the word, the government's agents. They are agents also in the technical sense of Principal-Agent theory if a parental action or personal characterisic of concern to the government is private information. Modelling family policy as an agency problem gives rise to a wealth of new results, and casts doubt on some established ones.