Parental Altruism and Child Lead Exposure: Inferences from the Demand for Chelation Therapy

We use parents' decisions to treat their children's body burdens of lead to infer parental ex ante willingness to pay for reduced burdens. Willingness to pay is estimated with a data set containing 256 observations; the data were originally gathered to assess the impact of children's body lead burdens upon their intellectual and behavioral development. Our results indicate that parental ex ante willingness to pay for a 1 percent reduction in child body lead burden exceeds the estimated ex post savings in medical treatment and compensatory education costs caused by the same reduction.