Malaria imposes societal costs beyond health, including substantial effects on education, yet economic evaluations often overlook these broader impacts. We conducted a cross-sectoral benefit–cost analysis (BCA) of malaria chemoprevention in school-aged children (SAC) across ten high-burden sub-Saharan African countries. Using recent trial data, we estimated impacts on malaria morbidity, mortality, school absenteeism and literacy. The intervention was projected to cost $422 million and generate $5.7 billion in societal net benefits, yielding a benefit–cost ratio (BCR) of 14.3. Country-level BCRs ranged from 3.71 to 39.5, with the highest returns in Nigeria. Results were sensitive to drug choice, discount rate and valuation of education benefits. When using school quality metrics (estimated via learning-adjusted years of schooling (LAYS)), BCRs increased up to 100-fold compared to estimates based on school quantity alone. Probabilistic sensitivity analysis yielded a mean simulated BCR of 11.00 (95 per cent confidence interval (95% CI): 10.89–11.11), with a >95% probability of being cost-beneficial at a BCR threshold of 3. This study advances the evidence base for malaria chemoprevention in SAC, highlighting its dual health and educational benefits. These findings offer policymakers and funders strong evidence to prioritize malaria chemoprevention in SAC as a high-value investment in both health and human capital in malaria-endemic regions.

Although wage rates are lower when employers have monopsony power, we find that the value of a statistical life (VSL) is not reduced when labor markets are more concentrated. Because the estimated VSL is the product of the wage and the wage-risk tradeoff rate, a greater tradeoff rate in highly concentrated U.S. labor markets produces a larger VSL. The general relationship we find is robust with respect to different labor market data. Our results provide the first evidence contradicting policy-related concerns that the VSL is lower in monopsonistic labor markets. The average VSL is often about $13 million (USD 2022) both for the full sample and at the median market concentration level, and it does not decline at higher levels of HHI.

A longstanding puzzle for regulatory theory and practice has been the valuation of children’s lives, or more precisely, the valuation of mortality risks faced by children. There are data about parents’ willingness to pay (WTP) to reduce such risks, and that data might be used to estimate the value per statistical life (VSL) for children. The problem is that any such VSL comes from the parents’ valuations; it might not adequately capture the welfare effects of risk reduction for children themselves. It can be shown, however, that use of parental WTP, and the resulting VSL, is justified on four assumptions: (1) parents have adequate information, (2) parents do not suffer from a relevant behavioral bias, (3) parents have a limited budget for expenditures on their children, and regulation would amount to a forced exchange, producing a dollar-for-dollar reduction from that budget, and (4) parents are sufficiently motivated to care about their children’s welfare, so that parental judgments about how to allocate limited resources for their children promote their children’s welfare. If we relax one or more of these assumptions, the appropriate VSL for children might be different from, and potentially higher than, the VSL that emerges from use of parental WTP. Implementing the proposed framework presents serious but tractable empirical challenges.