Policies that improve early life human capital are a promising tool to alter disadvantaged children's lifelong trajectories. Yet, in many low-income countries, children and their parents face tradeoffs between schooling and productive work. If there are positive returns to human capital in child...

Can efforts to promote education deter child labor? We report on the findings of a field experiment where a conditional transfer incentivized the schooling of children associated with carpet factories in Nepal. We find that schooling increases and child involvement in carpet weaving decreases...

Globally, coercive labor (i.e., forced, bonded, and/or trafficked labor) and child labor are disproportionately prevalent in environments with weak regulatory enforcement and state capacity. Effective strategies for addressing them may therefore need to align with the private incentives of...

In this paper we construct a dynamic heterogeneous agent general equilibrium model to quantify the effects of child labor legislation on human capital accumulation and the distribution of wealth and welfare. Crucial model elements include a human capital externality in the market sector, an...

Higher wages are generally thought to increase human capital production especially in the developing world. We show that human capital investment is procyclical in early life (in utero to age 3), but then becomes countercyclical. We argue this countercyclical effect is caused by families...

Promoting minimum age of employment regulation has been a centerpiece in child labor policy for the last 15 years. If enforced, minimum age regulation would change the age profile of paid child employment. Using micro-data from 59 mostly low-income countries, we observe that age can explain less...

Pre-College human capital investment occurs within a competitive environment and depends on market incentives created by Affirmative Action (AA) in college admissions. These policies affect mechanisms for rank-order allocation of college seats, and alter the relative competition between blacks...

Using survey data from a field experiment in the U.S., we test whether and how financial incentives change student behavior. We find that providing post-secondary scholarships with incentives to meet performance, enrollment, and/or attendance benchmarks induced students to devote more time to...

In recent years, a number of governments and consumer groups in rich countries have tried to discourage the use of child labor in poor countries through measures such as product boycotts and the imposition of international labor standards. The purported objective of such measures is to reduce...

In this paper we investigate the positive and normative consequences of child-labor restrictions for economic aggregates and welfare. We argue that even though the laissez-faire equilibrium may be inefficient, there are usually better policies to cure these inefficiencies than the imposition of...