Why Is Child Labor Illegal? We present a theory of the emergence of laws restricting child labor or imposing mandatory education that is consistent with the fact that poor parents tend to oppose such laws. We find that if altruistic parents are unable to commit to educating their children, child-labor laws can increase the welfare of higher-income parents in an ex ante sense. On the basis of an...

Intra-Household Labor Supply, Migration, and Subsistence Constraints in a Risky Environment: Evidence from Rural El Salvador We use panel data from El Salvador to investigate migration and the intra-household allocation of labor as a strategy for coping with uninsured risk. Consistent with a model of a farm household with a binding subsistence constraint, we show that adverse agricultural produ...

This paper examines inter-generational persistence in child labor by developing a dynamic model and exploring its implications empirically in Brazil. We begin by building an overlapping generations model of the household child labor decision. We assume that this decision is made by the head of the household, where parents decide to send their child to work only if by doing so the child’s contri...

Intra-Household Labor Supply, Migration, and Subsistence Constraints in a Risky Environment: Evidence from Rural El Salvador We use panel data from El Salvador to investigate migration and the intra-household allocation of labor as a strategy for coping with uninsured risk. Consistent with a model of a farm household with a binding subsistence constraint, we show that adverse agricultural produ...

Why Is Child Labor Illegal? We present a theory of the emergence of laws restricting child labor or imposing mandatory education that is consistent with the fact that poor parents tend to oppose such laws. We find that if altruistic parents are unable to commit to educating their children, child-labor laws can increase the welfare of higher-income parents in an ex ante sense. On the basis of an...

This paper explores the e ects of rainwater harvesting (RWH) on aggregate household labor supply in areas prone to droughts. Using a Brazilian survey on rainwater harvesting, we nd that having a RWH infrastructure at the homestead increases household wellbeing through three channels: (i) a direct time allocation e ect since households spend less time fetching water from distant sources, the tim...

Using data from the National Survey of Standards of Living conducted in Guatemala in 2000, this article tests the hypothesis that Guatemalan households use child labor and reduce child schooling to cope with household shocks. First, the authors use factor analysis to estimate the latent household propensity to natural disasters and socioeconomic shocks. Then, they estimate bivariate probit mode...

This paper studies the importance of labor supply responses in enabling households to smooth consumption in the face of crop loss. The 1993 Indonesian Family Life Survey is unusual because it contains self-reported information on crop loss and on household responses to crop loss. 41.6 percent of households who reported a crop loss also reported that they responded by increasing their labor supp...

Measuring the total impact of health insurance receipt on household labor supply is important in an era of increased access to publicly provided and subsidized insurance. Although government expansion of health insurance to older workers leads to direct labor supply reductions for recipients, there may be spillover effects on the labor supply of uncovered spouses. While the most basic model pre...

A Collective Household Model of Time Allocation: A Comparison of Native Dutch and Immigrant Households in the Netherlands Although the number of immigrant households in the Netherlands is substantial, the labor supply choices of this group are usually neglected in empirical studies because these households are usually under-sampled. We use a stratified sample of Turkish, Surinamese/Antillean an...