Executive Summary Alternative income generating activities (IGA) for vulnerable families have the potential to increase or decrease child labor. Rising family incomes may make families less dependent on the child's economic contribution or better able to afford schooling expenses. Rising income may help families avoid sending a child away or the circumstances that lead to child migration or chi...

This paper exploits a unique longitudinal data set from Tanzania to examine the consequences of child labor on education, employment choices, and marital status over a 10-year horizon. We use crop and rainfall shocks as instrumental variables for child labor. For boys, we find that a one standard deviation (5.7 hour) increase in child labor leads 10 years later to a loss of approximately one ye...

This study assessed lesbian couples' division of labor, their satisfaction with division of labor and with their relationships, and their children's psychosocial adjustment. The 26 participating families were headed by lesbian couples, each of whom had at least 1 child between 4 and 9 years of age. Parents' relationship satisfaction was generally high but was unrelated to measures of parental d...

When labor incomes approach subsistence levels, the labor supply curve slopes outward, because the fight for survival mandates households to look for longer work hours in response to falling wage rates. We explore conditions under which near-subsistence scenarios may imply wage traps, labor market failures that can be the cause of undernourishment, illiteracy, and child labor. After stating gen...

This study examines how child support arrears affect fathers' labor force participation. It relies on longitudinal data from the Fragile Families and Child Well-Being Study. Findings from analyses of these data suggest that child support arrears result in declines in average weeks worked in the formal labor market in subsequent time periods. These findings are driven by the behaviors of fathers...

I present a structural model of labor and child-care options to analyze the impact of single mothers’ decisions on their children’s cognitive and non-cognitive development. Mothers decide on child-care arrangements and allocate their labor supply according to their preferences and constraints. I estimate the parameters of a production function of skills by applying simulation methods with data ...

Little is known about why children participate in activities that are labeled worst forms of child labor. Case-control approaches common in medicine are adapted to consider the correlates of participation in worst forms in the context of two worst forms of child labor in Nepal: portering and ragpicking. Paternal disability is a strong predictor of entry into each of the worst forms, and the pre...

Child labor's effect on academic achievement is estimated, using unique data on 3rd and 4th graders in 9 Latin American countries. Cross-country variation in truancy regulations provides an exogenous shift in the ages of children normally in these grades, providing exogenous variation in opportunity cost of child time. Leastsquares estimates of the impact of child labor on test scores are biase...