I argue that a households interdependent decisions over their childrens labor and school activities are not only a function of observable hard facts but also of its intrinsic values and beliefs. Applying econometric methods, after all observable factors have been controlled for, the degree to...

We develop a model of exploitative child labor with two key features: first, parents have imperfect information about whether employment opportunities available to their children are exploitative or not. Second, firms choose whether or not to exploit their child workers. In our model, a ban on...

In the presence of two-sided altruism, i.e., when parents and children care about each other’s utility, increases in parental income need not always lead to increases in schooling and to decreases in child labor. This surprising result derives from the systematic way capital market constraints...

This essay analyzes the economic causes and effects of household decisions concerning fertility, education and child labor when children can supplement family income early in life and must support their parents in old age as adults. Parents, who raise and educate children for both financial and...

Over the issue of the difference or otherwise between economically active children and home-care children, there are two competing claims by researchers. One holds that economically active children and home- care children are the same in that both groups of children have identical determinants,...

In a recent paper, Kaushik Basu and Pham Hoang Van (BV, 1998) develop an important and very interesting model in which a fairly productive economy exhibits multiple equilibria, with children working in at least one. They identify two assumptions as essential to this result. The first - - which...

Child labor laws should aim to protect children who work, instead of trying to remove children from work. In this paper, we identify an instance when the risk of exploitation lowers the expected bene…t of child labor to the child,and therefore suppresses child labor force participation....

We extend the “general model” in Basu and Van (1998) to allow for different types of hosueholds, and extend the model in Swinnerton and Rogers (1999) to allow for a more general utility function. Our new findings are (i) while in some contexts, a more equal income distribution can reduce or...