The influence of the mother's power on her child's labor in Mexico

Abstract

In order to understand what motivates parents to send their children to work, I apply a collective household model introducing child labor explicitly. Using data from Mexico, I estimate the mothers' bargaining power separately from the other parameters of the model. This parameter is then used in a second stage equation of children labor supply.

Intrahousehold Bargaining and Resource Allocation in Developing Countries

“…Above, we discuss these as outcome measures; but they are also used as measures of bargaining power. Whether or not women are able to make the decisions about whether or not to sell key assets (Reggio, 2010) or whether they are able to make decisions about food preparation and consumption (Patel et al, 2007) may be good indicators of women's bargaining power. In Mexico, when mothers have the power whether to decide to whether to sell assets, daughters work fewer hours in the labor market.…”

Counting the uncounted: The consequences of children's domestic chores for health and education in Ethiopia

“…It is also acknowledged that there may not necessarily be a one‐to‐one tradeoff between school and work hours, and that in certain conditions, children might be able to combine both activities (Edmonds, ). However, with very few exceptions (Reggio, ; Zabaleta, ; Putnick and Bornstein, ), existing studies make no distinction between child labor and light work: all of a child's time spent in work is child labor.…”

Parental Absence and Agency: The Household Characteristics of Hazardous Forms of Child Labour in Nepal

“…Another example of how the decision maker affects the probability of child labour is Reggio (). Assuming that the mother is more sensitive to child development than the father, the paper finds that higher mother's bargaining power within the household is related to a lower incidence of child labour in Mexico.…”