Evidence of persistence in child labor is found by examining household survey data from Brazil. We take advantage of the fact that the survey data includes information on child labor of both parents and children in a household, as well as information on the educational attainment of the grandparents. Most of the popular discussion has centered on the harmful effects of child labor and ways to limit its occurrence.
If the head of the household is the one who makes the decision about child labor, there is a possibility that there could be an intergenerational link in child labor. Van,4 we assume that the decision about children's work is made by the head of the household and that parents decide to send their child to work only if the child's contribution to the family's current consumption outweighs the family's future consumption benefit. would be happy to keep the child in school. We take advantage of the fact that the data includes data on the child labor of both parents and children in the family, as well as data on the educational achievements of the grandparents.
This result suggests that there is a relationship, beyond what is stated in the model, between the child labor of parents and the child labor of their children. Together, the model and the empirical results paint a vivid picture of persistence in child labor across generations. Using some reasonable characterizations of parental preferences and a child's human capital accumulation, it is possible to generate a child labor trap.
Although this particular model is a polar version of the return to education or the choice of child labor, we believe it well illustrates the fundamental intergenerational link.
Empirical Evidence from Brazil 3.1 The Data
Empirical Models of Inter-Generational Persistence of Child Labor
The first is a probit model of the child labor indicator variable on the labor status of parents' children and a vector of other controls. The second is a Cox proportional hazards model of the number of years between birth and the age at which the child entered the labor force on the indicator variable of parent child labor plus a set of control variables. To estimate the effect of parental child work on the incidence of work among youth aged 10–14, we first estimate a standard probit model.19 The dependent variable is an indicator that equals one if the child usually works every strictly positive hours at birth. the market.
If the child labor trap explanation described in the model is the only determinant of intergenerational persistence of child labor, then the effect of parental child labor should disappear when one controls for family wealth or some suitable proxy for it. Column three shows the regression results with parents' years of education added as dependent variables. As expected, parents' years of education have a negative and significant effect on the child's probability of working.
These results show that there is no direct relationship between grandparents' education and grandchild's child labor status. The income of the family, reduced by the incomes of all children, is included in. In this case, the coefficients for the child labor indicator variables of both parents are positive and significant, and the coefficients for the parents.
In the second specification, shown in the third column of Table 3, parents' schooling is not included. Here, the coefficients for the indicator variables of parental child labor are still positive and significant, but now the coefficient for the family income variable is negative and significant. For there appears to be an effect variable of parental child labor beyond the effect of family income and parental education.
An alternative way to estimate the intergenerational persistence of child labor is to estimate a Cox proportional hazard model of the number of years between birth and the age at which the child entered the labor market.24 This model accounts for the fact that we have observations of censored in our dataset. In Table 5, as expected, the incidence of children working by both parents increases the probability that the child enters the labor force at a younger age. Again, the more years of schooling for both parents, the less likely the child will enter the workforce at a younger age.
The Cost of Child Labor
We also expect that the more years of schooling the parents have, the less likely the child will enter the workforce earlier in life. The survival function for the model is shown in Table 4 and the results of this model are presented in Table 5. Also, girls are less likely to enter the labor force earlier (outside the home) than boys and urban children are less likely to enter workforce earlier than rural children.
Again, years of grandparental schooling do not affect the probability of a child entering the labor force earlier, as the last two columns of Table 5 reveal. The results of this Cox proportional hazards model are qualitatively similar to the results of the probit estimate given in Table 2. For estimates adjusted with selection bias, we add the number of sons and daughters aged zero to nine in the first stage of the regression.
For both fathers and mothers, the coefficient on age at work is positive and significant in all specifications. In the specification that excludes the variables of years of schooling, the coefficients of the age of entry into work can be interpreted as the lost earnings of an individual who entered the labor market one year earlier. Furthermore, child labor has a negative impact on current earnings, even when we control for education and other variables.
This means that there are negative aspects of being a child laborer over and above that of missing out on education. Therefore there does not seem to be a positive effect on adults' earnings from gaining work experience as a child labourer. The squared term is negative and significant, meaning that the marginal negative impact of child labor on adults decreases the later the individual enters the labor force.
Conclusion
Together, these results paint a striking picture of the intergenerational persistence and harmful consequences of child labor within families. Surprisingly, there appears to be an intergenerational effect of child labor that goes beyond what is transmitted through family income and parental education. This result suggests that richer models are needed with a more refined view of household child labor choice that takes into account this aspect of persistence.
On the one hand, if this result derives from some unobservable human capital characteristic that is captured by the parents' child labor variables (e.g. school quality), then our finding essentially captures the persistence of intergenerational poverty and thus it is consistent with our child labor trap model. On the other hand, if it comes from a difference in the preferences of households in which parents were child laborers, or different social norms related to child labor experience, then the current theoretical child labor literature is not sufficient to explain child labor in Brazil. Further research is needed to uncover this aspect of the persistence in child labor along with richer models.
Nevertheless, these results suggest that it may be better to consider households as a whole when designing policies aimed at reducing the incidence of child labour. These policies are important because in this paper we also show that child labor has detrimental effects on an individual's ability to earn as an adult. Thus, the negative effect of losing education is greater than the positive effect of gaining experience as a child worker.
This paper showed that the overall harmful effects of child labor extend far beyond the childhood years. It is therefore important to break this cycle within each household in order to achieve a permanent and long-term reduction of child labor in society. Policies that can break this cycle, from family to family, are potentially the most effective instrument for reducing the incidence of child labour.26 This type of policy may, for example, involve a one-time transfer of a critical level of resources to the family instead of continuous general support for children's education.
Basu (1999); Clive Bell and Hans Gersbach, "Child Labor and the Education of Society." Mimeo, (2000); Luis Felipe Lopez-Calva and Koji Miyamoto, "Filial Obligations, Technology, and Child Labor," Centro de Estudios Economicos, El Colegio de Mexico, Documento de Trabajo III Priya Ranjan, "Credit Constraints and the Phenomenon of Child Labor," Journal of Development Economics 64, no. Harry Anthony Patrinos and George Psacharopoulos, “Family Size, Schooling, and Child Labor in Peru—An Empirical Analysis,” Journal of Population Economics 10, no. George. 9 This assumption follows the tradition of Gary Becker's family theory: Gary Becker, Treatise on the Family.
Since we want to capture separate effects of father's and mother's child labor status and have an equal interpretation of the coefficients, we present the results with the sample described in the text. 17 See Christian Grootaert and Harry Anthony Patrinos, eds., Policy Analysis of Child Labor: A Comparative Study.
