Parental expectations and school enrolment decisions: Evidence from rural Ghana

We use field data to investigate factors that influence parents' decisions to enrol children in schools in rural Ghana. The empirical results identified a host of socio‐economic and household‐level factors including remittances parents expect from investing in education, parents perception of a child's desirable professions, cost of schooling and discount rate as significant determinants of parental school enrolment decision. When gender of the child and remittances are taken into account, we show male parents are more likely to invest in education of boys than girls because they expect significantly higher returns from their investment in boys. Female parents do not show such gender preference. The proportion of children enrolled in school is positively related to average cost of schooling for male parents Gender of parent plays a significant role in school enrolment decision making.     

Can conditional cash transfer programs serve as safety nets in keeping children at school and from working when exposed to shocks?

Income shocks on poor households are known to induce parents to take their children out of school and send them to work when other risk-coping instruments are insufficient. State dependence in school attendance further implies that these responses to short-run shocks have long-term consequences on children's human capital development. Conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs, where the condition is on school attendance, have been shown to be effective in increasing educational achievements and reducing child work. We ask the question here of whether or not children who benefit from conditional transfers are protected from the impacts of shocks on school enrollment and work. We develop a model of a household's decision regarding child school and work under conditions of a school re-entry cost, conditional transfers, and exposure to shocks. We take model predictions to the data using a panel from Mexico's Progresa experience with randomized treatment. Results show that there is strong state dependence in school enrollment. We find that the conditional transfers helped protect enrollment, but did not refrain parents from increasing child work in response to shocks. These results reveal that CCT programs can provide an additional benefit to recipients in acting as safety nets for the schooling of the poor.     

How Much of the Gender Difference in Child School Enrolment Can Be Explained? Evidence from Rural India

There are significant gender differences in child schooling in the Indian states though very few studies explain this gender difference. Unlike most existing studies we take account of the implicit and explicit opportunity costs of schooling and use a bivariate probit model to jointly determine a child's participation in school and market jobs. Results obtained from the World Institute of Development Economics Research (WIDER) villages in West Bengal suggest that indicators of household resources, parental preferences, returns to and opportunity costs of domestic work significantly affect child school enrolment. While household resources have similar effects on enrolment of boys and girls, other arguments tend to explain a part of the observed gender difference. Even after taking account of all possible arguments, there remains a large variation in gender differences in child schooling that cannot be explained by differences in male and female characteristics in our sample.     

Reforms and education inequality in Ghana

We analyze the evolvement of education inequality and the gender gap in Ghana before and after two major education reforms. Using different measures of inequality, our findings suggest that the gender gap at the basic school level has closed following the introduction of the education expansion policies, but inequalities persist at the postbasic school levels and across regions. We further demonstrate that the educational expansion–schooling inequality nexus is best illustrated by an inverted U-shaped Kuznets curve. We find that after an average of 6 years of schooling has been reached, inequality starts to decline, and gender equality can be achieved when the average years of schooling reach 9.     

New Evidence on Intra‐Household Allocation of Resources in Japanese Households

This paper examines intra‐household allocation of resources to gain insight into family relationships and gender bias in Japanese households. We take the Engel curve approach to examine how adult consumption is affected by the presence of a child, either a boy or a girl, in the family. Empowered by diary‐based high quality spending data from the Family Income and Expenditure Survey, our empirical results show that adult consumption is significantly reduced in households with children; furthermore, gender bias is not observed in total adult expenditures, while responses of adult clothing expenses to the presence of a child are significantly different between a boy and a girl: spending on a father's clothing is reduced when the child is a school‐aged daughter, while spending on a mother's clothing decreases when a school‐aged son is in the home. Our analysis also shows that after the early 2000s girls receive a larger share of spending for children's clothing as well as for high school education than boys.     

Child Schooling and Work Decisions in India: The Role of Household and Regional Gender Equity

Abstract

This paper tests three hypotheses about how mothers' autonomy in India affects their children's participation in school and the labor market. To do so it extends the concept of mothers' autonomy beyond the household to include the constraints imposed by the extent of gender equity in the regions in which these women live. This study began with the expectation that increased autonomy for Indian mothers living in heterosexual households would increase child schooling and decrease child work. However, the results are mixed, indicating that mother's autonomy can be reinforced or constrained by the environment. The paper concludes that mothers and fathers in India make different decisions for girls vis-à-vis boys and that the variables reflecting mothers' autonomy vary in their impact, so that mothers' level of education relative to fathers' is not often statistically significant, while mothers' increased contributions to household expenditure decrease the probability of schooling and girls' work.     

Evaluating universal primary education in Uganda: School fee abolition and educational outcomes

This paper analyzes the effect of lifting primary school fees on educational attainment in Uganda. After the abolishment of school fees in 1997, the enrollment rate more than doubled. Two decades later, we know little about the effect of the policy on educational attainment. With recent data on eight cohorts exposed to free education, we analyze the impact of the policy on years of completed primary school, completion of primary school, and transitioning to secondary school. We use a straightforward regression analysis with cohort dummies and household fixed effects to control for unobserved heterogeneity. We find that lifting school fees had no effect on the years of primary school achievement and the likelihood of primary school completion. We find some weak evidence that the likelihood of those who completed primary education to start secondary school increased after Universal Primary Education.     

Social learning,neighborhood effects,and investment in human capital: Evidence from Green-Revolution India

This paper empirically identifies social learning and neighborhood effects in schooling investments in a new technology regime. Social learning implies that learning is most efficient when observed heterogeneity in schooling is greatest. The estimates of learning-investment rule, from farm household panel data at the onset of the Green Revolution in India, show that (i) agents learn about schooling returns from income realizations of their neighbors, and (ii) the speed of learning is high when the variation of schooling is large. Thus, schooling distribution of the parents' generation in a community has externalities to schooling investments in children. Simulations show that the variations in schooling within and across communities generate variations in child enrollment rate and average household income.     

CHILD LABOUR IN VIETNAM

Abstract.  The paper tests the explanatory power of a theoretical model of household decisions about child labour and school enrolment and analyses the determinants of child labour in Vietnam, a country that is experiencing a rapid transition toward a market economy. The theoretical framework, used as a benchmark, is in the spirit of the 'new household' economics and links household decisions about schooling and child labour to intergenerational altruism and to human capital investment. On this basis, we analyse the evolution and determinants of child labour using two household surveys (1993 and 1998) for Vietnam.     

Why is child labor illegal?

We present a theory of the emergence of laws restricting child labor or imposing mandatory education that is consistent with the fact that poor parents tend to oppose such laws. We find that if altruistic parents are unable to commit to educating their children, child-labor laws can increase the welfare of higher-income parents in an ex ante sense. On the basis of an empirical analysis of Latin-American household surveys, we demonstrate that per capita income in the country of residence has the predicted effect on child labor supply, even after controlling for other household characteristics.     

Does Child Labour Displace Schooling? Evidence on Behavioural Responses to an Enrollment Subsidy

It is often argued that child labour comes at the expense of schooling and so perpetuates poverty for children from poor families. To test this claim we study the effects on children's labour force participation and school enrollments of the pure school-price change induced by a targeted enrollment subsidy in rural Bangladesh. Our theoretical model predicts that the subsidy increases schooling, but its effect on child labour is ambiguous. Our empirical model indicates that the subsidy increased schooling by far more than it reduced child labour. Substitution effects helped protect current incomes from the higher school attendance induced by the subsidy.     

International migration,remittances, and schooling: evidence from El Salvador

We examine the effect of remittances from abroad on households' schooling decisions using data for El Salvador. Following the massive war-related emigration of the 1980s, remittances became a significant source of household income throughout the 1990s. We use the Cox proportional hazard model to examine the determinants of school attendance. Measuring income from a source that is uncorrelated with parental schooling—remittances—, we find that remittances have a large, significant effect on school retention. We estimate that while household income net of remittances has a small, though significant, impact on the hazard of leaving school in rural and urban areas, remittances have a much larger impact on the hazard of leaving school. In urban areas, the effect of remittances is, at its smallest, 10 times the size of the effect of other income. In rural areas, the effect of remittances is about 2.6 times that of other income. Our finding is of interest in that it suggests that subsidizing school attendance, particularly in poor areas, may have a large impact on school attendance and retention, even if parents have low levels of schooling.     

Coffee production effects on child labor and schooling in rural Brazil

I use variation in coffee production to measure changes in local economic conditions, which proxy for the value of children's time. I test how this short-term variation affects child labor and schooling in Brazilian coffee regions using seven rounds of household surveys. Increases in the county-level value of coffee production led to more work among middle-income boys and girls, poorer children were withdrawn from school, while richer children were not affected. Thus, during periods of economic growth, education of the poor may be adversely affected.     

Compulsory Schooling Laws and the Cure for Child Labour

This paper provides an explanation for the existence of child labour which relies on the imperfect enforcement of compulsory schooling laws. In the presence of complementarities in the production of human capital that justify legislative intervention, mandatory measures ensure that coordination failures are solved so that all parents send their children to school and the socially optimal equilibrium is reached. However, if enforcement of legislation is too low, multiple equilibria emerge. In this case, compulsory schooling laws may have adverse welfare effects on all households.     

Conditional cash transfers tools to combat child labor: Evidence from a randomized controlled trial in Costa Rica

The Government of Costa Rica collaborated with a research team to conduct a randomized controlled trial of their Working Children and Adolescents program. The program provided working youth with a monthly cash transfer with the conditions that they attend school regularly and complete their grade. This study examines the effect of the cash transfer on (1) child labor and hazardous child labor participation as well as hours worked; (2) school enrollment, attendance, and completion; and (3) self-reported health. The main findings provide evidence of a statistically significant reduction of more than 4 hours worked per week by children. The findings also suggest null effects on labor participation and school outcomes. Cost-effectiveness analysis shows that the program demonstrates a transfer effectiveness and cost-effectiveness comparable to similar interventions in Latin American countries. The subsidy alone does not seem enough to improve schooling outcomes, justifying the necessity of additional education policies to complement the cash transfer program.     

Assessing the Impact of District Primary Education Program in India

We examine the impact of India's District Primary Education Program (DPEP) introduced in the mid‐1990s. We exploit the fact that the DPEP was targeted towards primary school age children and was introduced in phases to different districts in India, and many of the districts never got the program to implement a difference‐in‐difference strategy to find the causal impact of the program on probability of attended primary school, probability of completed primary education and years of schooling. We find that the DPEP program increased the probability of attended primary school and completed primary school by about 2 percentage points. Similarly, the program increased the years of schooling by 0.16 years.     

The impact of rural electrification on income and education: Evidence from Bhutan

We investigate the impact of a rural electrification program on household income and children's schooling in rural Bhutan. Using propensity score matching, we find that electrification had a statistically significant impact on nonfarm income and education. Nonfarm income increased by 61 percent and children gained 0.72 additional years of schooling and 9 minutes of study time per day. We do not observe significant effects on farm income. Results are consistent and robust to different matching algorithms. Our findings indicate that investments in reducing energy deficit may help improve human welfare in Bhutan.     

The effects of heavily indebted poor countries initiative (HIPC) on millennium development goals (MDGs) for education

In this study, we employ the difference in difference approach to estimate the impact of heavily indebted poor countries initiative on Millennium Development Goals for education in Africa. Using the World Bank data for the period 1990–2015, the studies further identifies other factors that contribute to the achievement of millennium development goals for education. For instance, because of HPIC, the level of the following education MDGs indicators increased: gross enrollment in primary school (21.69%), female-to-male ratio (8.68%) and primary completion rate (13.69). Our study also show that the probability to achieve the millennium development goals for education increases in: female primary education teachers; school enrollment in tertiary, private school enrollment; pupil–teacher ratio; control of corruption and political stability and decreases with increase in the rural population. In this perspective, government of African countries should promote governance, subsidy private schools and recruit female teachers.     

Always Poor or Never Poor and Nothing in Between? Duration of Child Poverty in Germany

Abstract. This paper analyses the duration of child poverty in Germany. Observing the entire income history from the individuals' birth to their coming of age at age 18, we are able to analyse dynamics in and out of poverty for the entire population of children, whether they become poor at least once or not. Using duration models, we find that household composition, most importantly single parenthood, and the labour market status as well as level of education of the household head are the main driving forces behind exit from and re‐entry into poverty and thus determine the (long‐term) experience of poverty.     

Moving to safety and staying in school: The effects of violence on enrollment decisions in Mexico

There is a vast literature documenting negative impacts of crime on human capital accumulation, which has focused on large‐scale armed conflicts affecting both individuals and infrastructure. However, there is much less evidence in contexts where violence is not accompanied by the destruction of infrastructure. To fill this gap, this paper studies the effects of Mexico's War on Drugs (WoD) on individuals’ schooling decisions. Our results show only small effects of violence on total enrollment of children and young adults, in contrast to recent studies which find significant negative effects for some specific age‐by‐gender groups. Our analysis, which aims to assess the overall impacts of the WoD on enrollment decisions and takes advantage of various rounds of administrative data, the population census, and labor force surveys, shows that many families responded to the increase in violence by migrating to less affected municipalities. However, we find that their education decisions have been quite robust as greater violence did not affect their probability of being enrolled in school. In the long term, however, it is still possible that the increase in violence affects human capital accumulation through indirect effects arising in skill acquisition in early childhood and other stages.