The welfare of farm animals is a policy area that has increased greatly in importance in recent years. When deciding whether a proposed policy should be implemented, it can be useful for policymakers to compare the costs of the proposed improvement with the perceived benefits. The costs are relatively straightforward to calculate but little is known about the benefits. The Contingent Valuation Method (CVM), a direct survey-based method, can be used to shed some light on this. This approach elicits the willingness-to-pay (WTP) for the provision of some public good or service. This paper reports the results of a contingent valuation study of the value of welfare improvements for growing pigs. Attitudes and opinions with regard to farm animal welfare are explored and WTP elicited for various pig welfare improvements including increases in space allowance, environmental enrichment and research into improved pig housing design. The results reveal a positive WTP for these improvements. However, it is also noteworthy that a significant proportion of the general public is willing to pay nothing for these improvements. Overall, the study illustrates the usefulness of the CVM approach as a tool for policymakers in assessing the merits of possible policy initiatives affecting the welfare of animals.

As males in Mexico have the authority in households and dominate migration flows to the US, this paper argues that having a son as the first child provides an early additional candidate for the anchor position in Mexico and for migration trips to the US, making households better off. Fathers with longer migration experiences have higher expectations for future migration trips and stronger incentives to manipulate the sex of their first child. The empirical analysis confirms that by presenting positive effects of fathers’ previous migration experiences on the probability of having a son as a firstborn child, though abortions are widely illegal in Mexico.

Building on a nonlinear additively separable representation for the generator of preferences, this article provides an extensive characterization of intertemporal consumption—leisure arbitrages with an endogenous measure of impatience. A joint characterization of the comparative dynamics of consumption and leisure is undertaken. An analytical approach first puts in evidence a classical Slutsky decomposition between revenue and substitution effects after various perturbations. Those conclusions are at a second stage illustrated by a three-dimensional geometric argument.