Child Farm Labor: The Wealth Paradox

The Luxury Axiom, the Wealth Paradox, and Child Labor

Basu and Van (1998) present a fundamental framework of child labor with two important axioms: the luxury axiom and the substitution axiom. A number of empirical studies, however, reveal a “wealth paradox”. The current paper has two aims. First, it develops a model that provides an explanation for “the wealth paradox” in light of the luxury axiom and the substitution axiom. Second, it helps unde...

Child Labor and Household Wealth : Theory and Empirical

Some studies on child labor have shown that, at the level of the household, greater land wealth leads to higher child labor, thereby casting doubt on the hypothesis that child labor is caused by poverty. This paper argues that the missing ingredient may be an explicit modeling of the labor market. We develop a simple model which suggests the possibility of an inverted-U relationship between lan...

Farm Income Variability and the Supply of Off-Farm Labor

If farmers are risk averse, greater farm income variability should increase off-farm labor supply. This effect is confirmed for a sample of Kansas farmers. Off-farm employment of farmers and their spouses is also found to be significantly influenced by farm experience, off-farm work experience, farm size, leverage, efficiency, and farm-specific education. In addition, farm operators and spouses...

Capital Redistribution Brings Wealth by Parrondo’s Paradox

We present new versions of the Parrondo’s paradox by which a losing game can be turned into winning by including a mechanism that allows redistribution of the capital amongst an ensemble of players. This shows that, for this particular class of games, redistribution of the capital is beneficial for everybody. The same conclusion arises when the redistribution goes from the richer players to the...

Capital Redistribution Brings Wealth By Parrondo's Paradox