School Attendance and Child Labor -A Model of Collective Behavior

This paper theoretically investigates how community approval or disapprovalaects school attendance and child labor and how aggregate behavior of thecommunity feeds back towards the formation and persistence of an anti- (or pro-)schooling norm. The proposed community-model continues to take aggregate andidiosyncratic poverty into account as an important driver of low school attendanceand child labor. But it provides also an explanation for why equally poor villagesor regions can display dierent attitudes towards schooling. Distinguishing betweenthree dierent modes of child time allocation, school attendance, work, and leisure,the paper shows how the time costs of schooling and child labor productivity contributeto the existence of a locally stable anti-schooling norm.[...]