Recently, several studies have analysed active labour market policies by using a recently proposed matching estimator for multiple programmes. Since there is only very limited practical experience with this estimator, this paper checks its sensitivity with resprect to issues that are of...

We develop a new method to estimate the returns to R&D, their distribution, and their determinants. We model a continuous optimal treatment with outcome heterogeneity, where the treatment outcome depends on the applicant’s investment. The model takes into account application costs, and...

This paper develops a framework for analyzing the outcome of experiments carried out on forward-looking subjects. Natural experiments, unexpected policy changes, and true experiments are all included in the framework as special cases. These concepts are defined in conjunction with explicit...

We develop a model of exploitative child labor with two key features: first, parents have imperfect information about whether employment opportunities available to their children are exploitative or not. Second, firms choose whether or not to exploit their child workers. In our model, a ban on...

In an environment where children's time has an economic value and employment opportunities for educated workers are scarce, parental investments in their children's education may not be driven entirely by poverty and credit constraints. We offer evidence that children's participation in child...

In the presence of two-sided altruism, i.e., when parents and children care about each other’s utility, increases in parental income need not always lead to increases in schooling and to decreases in child labor. This surprising result derives from the systematic way capital market constraints...

I argue that a households interdependent decisions over their childrens labor and school activities are not only a function of observable hard facts but also of its intrinsic values and beliefs. Applying econometric methods, after all observable factors have been controlled for, the degree to...

This essay analyzes the economic causes and effects of household decisions concerning fertility, education and child labor when children can supplement family income early in life and must support their parents in old age as adults. Parents, who raise and educate children for both financial and...

Over the issue of the difference or otherwise between economically active children and home-care children, there are two competing claims by researchers. One holds that economically active children and home- care children are the same in that both groups of children have identical determinants,...

In a recent paper, Kaushik Basu and Pham Hoang Van (BV, 1998) develop an important and very interesting model in which a fairly productive economy exhibits multiple equilibria, with children working in at least one. They identify two assumptions as essential to this result. The first - - which...