You Get What You Pay For: Schooling Incentives and Child Labor

Eric Edmonds and Maheshwor Shrestha

No 19279, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Can efforts to promote education deter child labor? We report on the findings of a field experiment where a conditional transfer incentivized the schooling of children associated with carpet factories in Nepal. We find that schooling increases and child involvement in carpet weaving decreases when schooling is incentivized. As a simple static labor supply model would predict, we observe that treated children resort to their counterfactual level of school attendance and carpet weaving when schooling is no longer incentivized. From a child labor policy perspective, our findings imply that "You get what you pay for" when schooling incentives are used to combat hazardous child labor.

JEL-codes: J22 J88 O15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dem, nep-dev, nep-edu, nep-hrm, nep-lab and nep-lma
Note: CH DEV LS
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Published as Edmonds, Eric V. & Shrestha, Maheshwor, 2014. "You get what you pay for: Schooling incentives and child labor," Journal of Development Economics, Elsevier, vol. 111(C), pages 196-211.

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Journal Article: You get what you pay for: Schooling incentives and child labor (2014)
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