Does Work During Childhood Affect Adult’s Health? An Analysis for Guatemala

The diversity of potential relationships between child labor and health makes the empirical disentanglement of the causal relationship a difficult exercise. This paper examines the long run impact of child labour on health by controlling for unobserved household specific characteristics. In order to control for the unobserved households specific object, we estimate a conditional fixed effect model using data on siblings constructed from the Guatemalan National Survey of Living Condition. The estimation results reinforce the conventional wisdom that child labor is harmful for health in the long run. The results can be interpreted as a lower bound of the true impact since healthier children are most likely to offer themselves for employment and to be appointed