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

The literature regarding the cost of children exclusively focused on children living with couples. The purpose of this paper is to explore the extent to which tailoring the collective approach to single headed households can facilitate the estimation of the cost of children borne by a single-parent. To that end, I use the UK Family Expenditure Survey over the period 1978-2020. The inferences of children cost rest on the assignable goods method and the assumption of orthogonality of parents’ tastes and demographic change. The results show that the costs of supporting children is significantly similar for a representative parent, whether father or mother. However, the average cost of a child amounts to, respectively, 35% and 27% of total expenditures of single fathers and mothers. Overall, the weighted average cost of children for fathers is around 6 percentage points higher than that of mothers. Also, the findings indicate that the resource per child is invariant from the number of children for wealthiest parents, while children from lowincome families derive less from their parents’ total expenditures with larger family size. Finally, there is evidence of economies of scale with the presence of same-gender siblings.