The Problems of Disadvantaged Youth: An Economic Perspective

摘要

Dr. Jonathan Gruber, a professor at MIT and Director of the Health Care Program at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), edits this volume as part of the NBER's Program on Children. He identifies the main purpose of the volume to provide a sampling of how economists approach the study of the social problem of disadvantaged youth and "to introduce readers to tools that they can bring to bear" (p. 2) to the study of such phenomena. The volume is divided into three sections, each containing three articles: education (pre-kindergarten, public school choice, and compulsory schooling), health and healthy behaviors (mental health, obesity, and teenage pregnancy) and contextual influences (parental income shocks, religious and social participation, and neighborhood violence). The articles provide a unified economic perspective that consists of three major elements: an empirical review of the literature, a secondary econometric analysis of preexisting data, and interpretation of the results within a tacitly assumed rational choice framework typical of mainstream economics. This approach is employed to study a wide variety of topics related to children's well-being, thus exemplifying its versatility.