This paper uses longitudinal employment survey data to analyze the impact of household economic shocks on the schooling and employment transitions of young people in metropolitan Brazil. The paper uses data on over 100,000 children ages 10-16 from Brazil's Monthly Employment Survey (PME) from 1982 to 1999. Taking advantage of the rotating panels in the PME, we compare households in which the male household head becomes unemployed during a four-month period with households in which the head is continuously employed. Probit regressions indicate that an unemployment shock significantly increases the probability that a child enters the labor force, drops out of school, and fails to advance in school. The effects can be large, implying increases of as much as 50% in the probability of entering employment for 16-year-old girls. In contrast, shocks occurring after the school year do not have significant effects, suggesting that these results are not due to unobserved characteristics of households that experience unemployment shocks. The results suggest that some households are not able to absorb short-run economic shocks, with negative consequences for children.

No abstract

A generational perspective recognizes that children have preferences which may differ systematically from those of adults, and, furthermore, that a children's standpoint should be recognized by scholars and activists and incorporated into policy targeted at children and their families. Economics has not considered children as agents because of their lack of power relative to adults. The implications of recognizing children's agency are explored for the case of children's paid and unpaid labor force and household work.Child Agency, Child Labor, Unpaid Work,

Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) programs have become widespread in developing and underdeveloped countries as a way to alleviate current poverty and provide investments in human capital that could lead families to better life conditions in the long-term. The first goal is accomplished when poor families receive money from governments on a monthly basis, as a complementary income source. The second goal is reached by conditioning the cash transfers on certain behaviors, such as visiting enrolling children in school. However, these programs may also have impact on time use decisions within beneficiaries, particularly with respect to time spent working. In this paper, we aim to measure the impact of Brazilian conditional cash transfer programs on children and parents' labor status using the econometric framework of policy evaluation. The usual probit and Heckman econometric models show that CCT reduces the probability of work for children but not their time spent on labor market, and that the program is more efficient for girls than for boys. On the other hand, parent's labor participation is not affected but their working hours change due to the program. An alternative approach, the propensity score matching, will be performed in order to avoid the biases that might arise from some remaining heterogeneity problems.

No abstract