Beginning from the middle of the nineteenth century, an increasing number of countries have passed legislation which bans the formal employment of children. However, while child labor bans are now near-universal in industrial countries, in many developing countries child labor continues to be widespread. Child labor is often particularly popular among poorer families who depend on the additiona...

Objectives. Worldwide, over 200 million children are involved in child labor, with another 20 million children subjected to forced labor, leading to acute and chronic exposures resulting in safety and health (S&H) risks, plus removal from formal education and play. This review summarized S&H issues in child labor, including forced or indentured domestic labor as other sectors of child labor. Sp...

This paper investigates the issue of child labor in the context of land reforms in transition economies, using farm household data from the Republic of Georgia. The results show that an increase in landholdings as an outcome of the land reform can, in the presence of market imperfections, lead to an increase in child labor. This is because the increased demand for labor on the family farm is st...

Baland and Robinson (2000) investigate the conditions under which decisions by parents about their own children’s work are inefficient. Using a simple two-period model with altruistically linked family members, they show that child labor decisions are efficient when credit markets are perfect and intergenerational altruistic transfers are nonzero. Moreover, they show that when the level of chil...

Child labor was more prevalent in 19th-century industrializers than it is in developing countries today. It was particularly extensive in the earliest industrializers. This pattern may be a source of optimism signaling the spread of technologies that have little use for child labor and of values that endorse the preservation and protection of childhood. Today and historically, orphaned and fath...

Labor market wages do not typically provide an accurate or representative measure of the economic returns to child labor in rural settings, especially for women. This paper is a first attempt to identify other outcomes that can shed light on the longer-term impact of child labor. In particular, we examine the quality of marriage matches as measured by per capita household wealth and bride price...

Sibling rivalry occurs when siblings compete for parental investments. We examine how rivalry among biological siblings, who may not be co-resident, differs from rivalry among co-resident children and how this affects school enrollment for children in Burkina Faso. We test the hypothesis that the value of child labor in home production contributes to rivalry by comparing households that differ ...

Can Microinsurance Help Prevent Child Labor? An Impact Evaluation from Pakistan Child labor is a common consequence of economic shocks in developing countries. We show how reducing vulnerability can affect child labor and schooling. We exploit the extension of a health and accident insurance scheme by a Pakistani microfinance institution (MFI) that was set up as a randomized controlled trial an...