Child Work and Schooling in Bangladesh: The Role of Birth Order

Using data from Bangladesh, this paper examines how the birth order of a child influences parental decisions to place children in one of the four activities – ‘study only’, ‘study and work’, ‘neither work nor study’ and ‘work only’. The results from the multinomial logit model show that being a first-born child increases the probability of working as the prime activity or at least combining school with work rather than schooling only. The results confirm that later-born children are more likely to be in school than their earlier-born counterparts.