Children and Women’s Participation Dynamics: Direct and Indirect Effects Children affect the after-birth labor force participation of women in two ways. Directly, the time spent in child-care reduces the labor market effort. Time spent out of the labor market while on maternity leave alters women’s participation experience and indirectly affects subsequent participation behavior. This paper pro...

This paper describes how fertility is determined in a model that assumes the existence of child-care services. When child-care services exist, two multiple states result: a state that brings about low fertility with low female labor participation, and a state that brings about high fertility with high female labor participation. This result is consistent with the positive correlation that is fo...

In this paper we investigate the choices involved in the tradeoff between a child’s labor outside of household work and their schooling hours from a sample of data from Ghana in the late 1980’s. While households are interviewed only once during the survey, the data were collected over an 11 month period for both the Northern and Southern regions of Ghana. Northern and Southern Ghana have rather...

In 1998, nearly one-third of Vietnamese children engaged in non-housework labor supply, 95% of these working children residing in rural areas. This paper investigates the impact of child labour on children’s educational outcomes in rural Vietnam using the 1998-Vietnam Living Standard Survey. The paper finds that child labor lowers children’s academic performance and the negative impact is bigge...

In this paper we investigate whether the differential evolution of child labor across Brazilian states between 1980 and 2000 can be explained by their different patterns of specialization in industries where children have a comparative advantage. We find that the adoption of different industries mixes by different states accounts for 20% to 30% of the observed variation in child labor in rural ...

Trade's effect on the living standards of the poor is generally found to be the dominant channel through which trade influences child time allocation and schooling. Trade can influence the living standards of the poor by changing consumption prices and through altering labor and family asset income. It is this later channel, changes in labor and asset incomes, that researchers have highlighted ...

Numerous proposals have surfaced recently to incorporate a labor-standards clause into the rules of the World Trading Organization (WTO). Such a clause would require recognition and enforcement by each WTO member of certain core labor standards (CLS): freedom from forced labor, absence of discrimination, elimination of exploitative use of child workers, and rights of workers to associate freely...

The problem of child labor has moved from a matter of regional and national concern to one of international debate and possible global persuasion and policy intervention. In crafting policy for mitigating this enormous problem of our times, it is important to start with a proper theoretical and empirical understanding of the phenomenon. What gives rise to child labor, and what are its consequen...