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.     

The Impact of Placing Adolescent Males into Foster Care on Education,Income Assistance,and Convictions

Understanding the causal impacts of taking at‐risk youth into government care is part of the evidence base for policy. Two sources of exogenous variation affecting alternative subsets of the at‐risk population provide causal impacts interpreted as local average treatment effects. Placing 16‐ to18‐year‐old males into care decreases or delays high school graduation, increases income assistance receipt, and has alternative effects on criminal convictions depending upon the instrument employed. This suggests that asking whether more or fewer children should be taken into care is insufficient; it also matters which, and how, children are taken into care.     

The intergenerational transmission of education: Evidence from Taiwanese adoptions

This paper examines the causal effect of parental schooling on children’s schooling using a large sample of adoptees from Taiwan. Using birth-parents’ education to help control for selective placement of children with adoptive parents, we find that adoptees raised with more highly educated parents have higher educational attainment, measured by years of schooling and probability of university graduation. We also find evidence that adoptive father’s schooling is more important for sons’ and adoptive mother’s schooling is more important for daughters’ educational attainment. These results support the notion that family environment (nurture) is important in determining children’s educational outcomes, independent of genetic endowment.     

HUMAN CAPITAL AND THE PROBABILITY OF DIVORCE

Concern about the high poverty rates experienced by children in female‐headed households has led to policies aimed at increasing these households' income. In this paper we present a model that analyses decisions made before and during marriage to invest in the human capital of parents and children. These decisions result from a variety of anticipated post‐divorce monetary transfers between spouses.     

The dynamics of immigrant participation in entitlement programs: evidence from Canada, 1993–2007

Abstract Using uniquely rich Canadian administrative data from the 1993–2007 period, I find no evidence of rising Employment Insurance (EI) participation across recent‐immigrant cohorts and no evidence of rising EI participation with number of years spent in Canada beyond the short period following entrance into the Canadian labour market. I also find little evidence of the rising immigrant participation in Social Assistance (SA), either across recent arrival cohorts or with years in Canada. The results do not appear to be seriously affected by emigration and attrition within each immigrant cohort. While the immigrant participation in traditional ‘welfare’ programs such as Social Assistance has generally declined from 1993 to 2007, I show that Canada Child Tax Benefit and other federal and provincial programs aimed at providing financial assistance to families with children have become a major source of transfer income to immigrant families.     

The Effect of Parental Absence on Child Development in Rural China

This study estimates the effect of parental absence on the development of children in rural China. Although some previous studies have looked into the effect of parental absence on children's academic achievements, we investigate the effects of parental absence on both the cognitive and non‐cognitive skills of children. Our results show that parental absence during early child development mostly incurs negative effects on the academic achievement and non‐cognitive development of children. A child whose parents are both absent tends to have lower Chinese and mathematics test scores, lower self‐assessment on his/her behavior, and is less likely to be happy and satisfied. A gender difference is also observed in the effect of parental absence: girls suffer more from the effect of both parents being absent on their mathematics test scores than do boys.     

Fatal fluctuations? Cyclicality in infant mortality in India

This paper investigates the impact of aggregate income shocks on infant mortality in India and investigates likely mechanisms. A recent OECD-dominated literature reports the provocative finding that mortality at most ages is pro-cyclical. Similar analyses for poorer countries are scarce, and both income risk and mortality risk are greater in poor countries. This paper uses data and methods designed to avoid some of the specification problems in previous studies and it explores mechanisms and extensions that have not been previously considered. It uses individual data on infant mortality for about 150,000 children born in 1970-1997, merged by cohort and state of birth with a state panel containing information on aggregate income. Identification rests upon comparing the effects of annual deviations in income from trend on the mortality risks of children born at different times to the same mother, conditional upon a number of state-time varying covariates including rainshocks and state social expenditure. Rural infant mortality is counter-cyclical, the elasticity being about − 0.33. This is despite the finding that relatively high-risk women avert birth or suffer fetal loss in recessions. It seems in part related to recessions stimulating distress labor amongst mothers, in contrast to the case in richer countries, where they discourage labor market participation. Health-care seeking declines in recessions, and this appears to be related to the opportunity cost of maternal time. Disaggregation reveals that the average results are driven by rural households in which the mother is uneducated or had her first birth in teenage, and that it is only girls that are at risk; boys are protected from income shocks. Exposure to poor conditions in the fetal and neonatal period appears to have a larger effect on infant mortality than similar exposure in the postneonatal period.     

The political economy of public education

I study the relationship between income inequality and public spending in education in a voting model. Voters collectively choose the uniform quality level of public education, the amount of a public good, and the tax rate on labor income. Parents can decide to opt-out of the public education system by purchasing private education at the desired quality level, and children’s expected income is assumed to be increasing in the quality of education. I show that higher income inequality is associated with higher governmental spending in education if and only if the expected marginal returns to education are larger for the children of relatively low income parents. In turn, better public education tends to reduce future inequality. These results are consistent with most findings in the empirical literature about public investment in education. Lastly, I show that for other kind of publicly provided goods, such as health care, the relationship with income inequality exhibits an ambiguous or opposite sign.     

Timing and duration of paternal migration and the educational attainment of left‐behind children: Evidence from rural China

This paper examines the relationship between the migration of men from rural China and the educational attainment of their left‐behind children. The importance of migratory timing and duration are addressed. Using survey data, the study found that compared with rural children of nonmigrant parents, rural children of migrant fathers have a lower probability of being enrolled in school. In addition, the relationship between migratory timing, duration, and school enrollment shows an interesting pattern; children whose fathers migrated when they were infants are more likely to be enrolled in school, but children whose fathers migrated before their birth or after they reached school age are less likely to be enrolled in school. Possible explanations for this pattern are provided.     

Post‐secondary attendance by parental income in the U.S. and Canada: Do financial aid policies explain the differences?

We examine the extent to which tuition and needs‐based aid policies explain important differences in the relationship between family income and post‐secondary attendance relationships between Canada and the U.S. Using data from recent cohorts, we estimate substantially smaller attendance gaps by parental income in Canada relative to the U.S., even after controlling for family background, cognitive achievement, and local‐residence fixed effects. We next document that U.S. public tuition and financial aid policies are actually more generous to low‐income youth than are Canadian policies. Equalizing these policies across Canada and the U.S. would likely lead to a greater difference in income‐attendance gradients.     

Assessing the Possible Antipoverty Effects of Recent Rises in Age‐Specific Minimum Wages in New Zealand

Real minimum wages increased by nearly 33 percent for adults and 123 percent for teenagers in New Zealand between 1999 and 2008. Where fewer than 2 percent of workers were being paid a minimum wage at the outset of this sample period, more than 8 percent of adult workers and 60 percent of teenage workers were receiving hourly earnings close to the minimum wage by the end of this period. These policy changes provide a unique opportunity to estimate the effects of the minimum wage on poverty. Although minimum wage workers are more likely to live in the poorest households, they are relatively widely dispersed throughout the income distribution. This is particularly true of teenage minimum wage workers. Furthermore, low‐income households often do not contain any working members. We estimate that a 10 percent increase in minimum wages, even without a loss in employment or hours of work, would lower the relative poverty rate by less than one‐tenth of a percentage point.     

Free‐Riding and the Provision of Public Goods in the Family: A Laboratory Experiment*

We examine the provision of family public goods using experimental economics methods. With sufficient altruism and shared resource arrangements, families can provide the efficient level of family public goods. Becker's Rotten Kid Theorem asserts that transfers from altruistic parents will induce children to maximize family income even if children are not altruistic toward other family members. Consistent with altruism, parents and children contributed more to a public good when in groups with family members than when in groups with strangers. In contrast to the predictions of the Rotten Kid Theorem, however, children's behavior fell short of maximizing family income.     

Adaptation and inequality: children of immigrants in Canadian schools

Abstract.  Children of immigrant parents have comparable test scores in reading and mathematics to those of the children of the Canadian born. Children of immigrant parents whose mother tongue is neither English nor French have low performance in vocabulary before age six but performance in mathematics and reading that is comparable to that of the children of Canadian‐born parents by age fourteen. The 10th percentile of the vocabulary distribution is lower for children of immigrant parents whose mother tongue is neither English nor French than for children of Canadian‐born parents. However, this difference is not present in reading and mathematics test scores. JEL classification: J150, I210     

Does the relationship between income and child health differ across income groups? Evidence from India

This study explores the relationship between child health and socioeconomic status (health-income gradient) using the Indian Human Development Survey-II (2011-12) for children up to 5 years of age. Unlike previous studies our empirical analysis allows the gradient to vary across different income intervals using linear and cubic spline regressions. We use objective measure of child health - height-for-age Z-scores and find that an increase in income, on an average leads to reduction in prevalence of stunting. We also find differential effect of income on health across the income distribution with no effect of income on child health for very poor households. Further we explore underlying factors explaining the gradient and find that maternal health, housing quality, sanitation, non-infectious environment, media exposure to women and a safe neighbourhood are transmission channels that affect child health and together they explain almost 40% of the overall income effect. One of the major implication of our findings is that any policy to increase income of poor households should be complemented with a health policy designed specifically towards children as poor households are less likely to allocate additional income to child health.     

Fertility,Intra‐Generational Redistribution,and Social Security Sustainability

Incorporating heterogeneity in preference to having children into an overlapping generations model of a small open economy, we examine the effects of changes in the size of pay‐as‐you‐go (PAYG) social security on fertility choices of individuals and population growth of the economy. It is shown that PAYG social security will raise population growth by increasing the number of individuals who have children and the number of children parents have if the system involves redistribution between retirees with different contributions, whereas, if it has no redistribution, PAYG social security does not affect the fertility decisions of individuals.     

Gender Differences in Educational Attainment: Evidence on the Role of Tracking from a Finnish Quasi‐experiment

In this paper we study the relationship between the timing of tracking of pupils into vocational and academic secondary education and gender differences in educational attainment and income. It is argued that in a comprehensive system, where students are tracked into vocational and academic schools relatively late (age 15–16), girls are more likely to choose the academic track than boys. We exploit the Finnish comprehensive school reform of the 1970s to analyse this hypothesis. This changed the Finnish school system from a selective to a comprehensive structure and postponed tracking from the age of 10–11 to 15–16. Since the reform was not implemented at the same time throughout the country, we can observe members of the same cohorts under both systems. The shift to a comprehensive system was found to increase gender differences in the probability of choosing an academic secondary education and of continuing onto academic tertiary education. Moreover, the reform decreased the gender wage gap in adult income by four percentage points.     

The effect of family welfare support on the likelihood of having another child and parents’ labor supply

Governments have recently attempted to reverse the below-replacement fertility rates in Europe by reducing child-rearing costs through child benefits, grants and paid leaves. This article examines the causal effect of family allowances on the likelihood of having another child, and on the extensive and intensive margins of labor supply. Evidence from Switzerland suggests that higher child benefits incentivize parents to have more children but do not affect their employment choice. The effect is larger for low-income families. These findings imply that policies aimed at improving the economic well-being of families are likely to increase fertility rates without distorting labor market outcomes.