We develop a positive theory of the adoption of child labor laws. Workers who compete with children in the labor market support the introduction of a child labor ban, unless their own working children provide a large fraction of family income. Since child labor income depends on family size,...

We develop a positive theory of the adoption of child labor laws. The key mechanism in our model is that parents' decisions on family size interact with their preferences for child labor regulation. If policies are endogenous, multiple steady states with different child labor policies can exist....