Children’s Working Hours and School Enrollment: Evidence from Pakistan and Nicaragua

Although much of the literature on child labor looks at the decision on whether to send a child to school or to work (or both), little attention has focused on the number of hours worked. This article analyzes the determinants of school attendance and hours worked by children in Pakistan and Nicaragua. A theoretical model of children’s labor supply is used to simultaneously estimate the school attendance decision and the hours worked, using a full model maximum likelihood estimator. The model analyzes the marginal effects of explanatory variables, conditioning on latent states, that is, the propensity of the household to send the child to work or not. These marginal effects are in some cases rather different across latent states, with important policy implications.