Gender Roles, School Drop-Offs and Child Labor : Evidence from Bangladesh

This paper examines the key factors influencing child labor in Bangladesh, differentiating between domestic child workers and market child laborers, as compared to children attending school. Utilizing data from the 2016 Bangladesh Household Income and Expenditure Survey (HIES), we incorporate individual child and household characteristics as explanatory variables for binomial and multinomial logit regression models. Our key findings reveal the following: early adolescents are more likely to engage in market labor at the expense of their education than younger children. Child marriage increases the likelihood of girls entering domestic work, while also raising the probability of boys transitioning into market labor. Households with a higher proportion of earners and some level of educational attainment (as opposed to none) are less likely to encourage children to leave school for employment. Finally, households receiving any form of stipend or educational allowance demonstrate a reduced inclination to compromise their children’s education