Child work : an expository framework of altruistic and non-altruistic models

In this paper the authors present, and confront two approaches to modeling child labor. The first assume that parents are altruistic towards their offspring, while the second sees children as an asset to parents, especially in terms of old age security. The paper also extends the analysis to consider fertility as endogenous and jointly determined together with children's activities. The paper uses a simple basic model that try to frame the main effects discussed in the literature, while providing some novel results in terms of the consequences of treating fertility as endogenous and of the effects of uncertainty in expected old age transfers from children.