The causes and consequences of child labour are examined theoretically and empirically within a household decision framework, with endogenous fertility and mortality. The data come from a nationally representative survey of Indian rural households. The complex interactions uncovered by the...

Household poverty is a powerful motive for child labor and working frequently comes at the expense of schooling for children. Accounting for these natural links we investigate whether and when there is an additional role for community norms and how the social evaluation of schooling evolves over...

Do the short and medium term adjustment costs associated with trade liberalization influence schooling and child labor decisions? We examine this question in the context of India's 1991 tariff reforms. Overall, in the 1990s, rural India experienced a dramatic increase in schooling and decline in...

Coca eradication and interdiction are the most common policies aimed at reducing the production and distribution of cocaine in the Andes, but little is known about their impact on households. This paper uses the shift in the production of coca leaves from Peru to Colombia in 1995 to analyze the...

We analyze the impact of child labor on school achievement using Brazilian school achievement test data from the 2003 Sistema Nacional de Avaliação da Educação Básica (SAEB). We control for the endogeneity of child labor using instrumental variable techniques, where the instrumental...

This paper examines the influence of adult market wages and having parents who were child labourers on child labour, when this decision is jointly determined with child schooling, using data from Egypt. The empirical results suggest that low adult market wages are key determinants of child...

This paper theoretically investigates how community approval or disapproval affects school attendance and child labor and how aggregate behavior of the community feeds back towards the formation and persistence of an anti- (or pro-) schooling norm. The proposed community-model continues to take...

Given that credit and insurance markets are imperfect, and given also that intra-household transfers, and much of the work a child does, are private information, the second-best policy uses a combination of need and merit based education awards, together with a mix of taxes on parental income,...

Using the first two waves of the Vietnam Living Standards Survey, we investigate how a father's temporary absence affects children left behind in terms of their school attendance, household expenditures on education, and nonhousework labor supply in the 1990s. The estimating subsample is...

This paper develops and estimates a simple structural model of household decisions regarding child labor and schooling. We argue that part of the conflicting results from the previous literature related to the effect of improvements in economic conditions on child labor derives from the...