177 © Te Author(s) 2018
M. La Torre, M. Calderini (eds.), Social Impact Investing Beyond the SIB, Palgrave
Studies in Impact Finance, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78322-2_7
7
Beneft-Cost Evaluation of Prevention
and Early Intervention Measures
for Children and Youth in Sweden
Lars Hultkrantz
1 Introduction
In a series of studies, Heckman and collaborators (e.g., Heckman 2006;
Cunha and Heckman 2010) have observed that there is a high social rate
of return on investments in young people. Heckman’s work brought
attention to how it is possible to estimate the economic yield to eforts
invested in children, such as early interventions. Remarkably, while a
substantial efort has been put in for decades in the United States and to
some extent in the United Kingdom (Edovald et al. 2013) into such anal-
ysis, there is not much corresponding work in continental Europe. For
instance, a recent “Frankfurt declaration” issued by the German Congress
on Crime Prevention (2016) observes that this country ofers next to
nothing in terms of cost-efectiveness and beneft-cost analysis (BCA) for
assessing such interventions. Here, I report on an on-going efort by sev-
eral researchers to create a BCA model with Swedish data for evaluation
L. Hultkrantz (*)
Örebro University School of Business, Örebro, Sweden
e-mail: Lars.Hultkrantz@oru.se