This paper examines inter-generational persistence in child labor by developing a dynamic model and exploring its implications empirically in Brazil. We begin by building a simple overlapping generations model of the household child labor decision. We assume that this decision is made by the head of the household, where parents decide to send their child to work only if by doing so the child's contribution to the present consumption of the family outweighs the future consumption benefit the family would enjoy from keeping the child in school. The main predictions of the model are that children are more likely to work when they come from households with parents who were child laborers, from households with parents who have lower educational attainment and that child labor has adverse effects on children's educational attainment and their adult earnings. Evidence of persistence in child labor is found by examining household survey data from Brazil. We exploit the fact that the survey data includes information on child labor of both parents and children in a household, as well as information on the educational achievement of the grandparents. We find that children are more likely to be child laborers the younger their parents were when they entered the labor force and the lower the educational attainment of the parents and of the grandparents. Another important finding is that individuals who start work at a younger age tend to end up with lower earnings as adults suggesting that the vocational training aspect of child labor does not the negative effect from loss of schooling.

This paper examines the effects of birth order on the child labor incidence and school attendance of Brazilian children. Evidence from the psychology and sociology literature suggests that earlier-born children tend to have higher innate abilities. The economic implications of these findings are that earlier-born children may have more intra -household resources directed to them when they are young, and better outcomes as adults in areas such as education and earnings. However, in the context of child labor, the effects of birth order can be confounded by the fact that earlier born children are able to command higher wages than their younger siblings. Also, in the presence of capital constraints, poor families may not be able to afford to send their earlier born children to school, but may be able to send their later-born children due to the income earned by their older siblings. This paper presents both a theoretical discussion and an empirical investigation of the relationship between birth order and child labor. The results from the empirical investigation show that, in fact, male firstborn children are less likely to attend school than their later born siblings and that male last-born children are less likely to work as child laborers than their earlier born siblings. For female children, first-borns are less likely to go to school than their later born counterparts. These findings are intriguing as they run counter to the received wisdom of the effects of birth order, but make sense when considering the child labor decision of poor families in the face of capital constraints.(JEL classification numbers: J20, O12, O54)

No abstract

An extensive survey data set of Brazilian households is used to test whether intrahousehold gender bias affects the decisions of mothers and fathers to send their sons and daughters to work and to school. An intrahousehold allocation model is examined in which fathers and mothers may affect the education investment and the child labor participation of their sons and daughters differently because of differences in parental preferences or differences in how additional schooling affects sons' and daughters' acquisition of human capital. Brazilian household survey data for 1998 are used to estimate the impact of each parent's education on the labor market participation and school attendance of their sons and daughters. For labor market participation, the father's education has a greater negative impact than the mother's education on the labor status of sons. The father's education also has a greater impact on sons' labor status than on daughters'. For schooling decisions, the mother's education has a greater positive impact than the father's education on daughters' school attendance, but fathers have a greater positive impact on sons' school attendance than on daughters'. JEL codes: J20, O12, O54 This article uses an extensive survey data set of Brazilian households to test whether intrahousehold gender bias influences the decisions of mothers and fathers to send their sons and daughters to work and to school. The results suggest that fathers generally have a greater impact on decisions about sons and mothers generally have a greater impact on decisions about daughters. These results support models of intrahousehold bargaining in the child labor and schooling decisions of a family, even though most theoretical work on child labor has assumed a unitary family model.

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. The Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in Bonn is a local and virtual international research center and a place of communication between science, politics and business. IZA is an independent nonprofit company supported by Deutsche Post World Net. The center is associated with the University of Bonn and offers a stimulating research environment through its research networks, research support, and visitors and doctoral programs. IZA engages in (i) original and internationally competitive research in all fields of labor economics, (ii) development of policy concepts, and (iii) dissemination of research results and concepts to the interested public. Terms of use: Documents in D I S C U S S I O N P A P E R S E R I E SIZA Discussion Papers often represent preliminary work and are circulated to encourage discussion. Citation of such a paper should account for its provisional character. A revised version may be available directly from the author. This paper explores the question: is working as a child harmful to an individual in terms of adult outcomes in earnings? Though an extremely important question, little is known about the effect of child labor on adult outcomes. Estimations of an instrumental variables earnings model on data from Brazil show that child labor has a large negative impact on adult earnings for male children even when controlling for schooling and that the negative impact of starting to work as a child reverses at around ages 12-14. JEL Classification:J31, O12, O54