The Short Term Impact of a Productive Asset Transfer in Families with Child Labor: Experimental Evidence from the Philippines

Eric Edmonds and Caroline Theoharides

No 26190, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Productive asset grants have become an important tool in efforts to push the very poor out of poverty, but they require labor to convert the asset into income. Using a clustered randomized trial, we work with the Government of the Philippines to evaluate a key component of their child labor elimination program, a $518 productive asset grant directed at families with child laborers. Treatment increases household based economic activity. Household well-being improves, mainly through increases in food security and child welfare. Households achieve these improvements in well-being by drawing upon the labor of household members. Adolescent labor is the most available labor, and we observe increases in employment among adolescents not engaged in child labor at baseline. Households with a family firm or business prior to treatment especially lack available adult labor to work with the asset leading to increases in child labor, including hazardous work, amongst children who were not in child labor at baseline.

JEL-codes: J22 L26 O15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp, nep-lma and nep-sea
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Published as Eric Edmonds & Caroline Theoharides, 2018. "The Short Term impact of a productive asset transfer in families with child labor: Experimental evidence from the Philippines," Journal of Development Economics, .

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Journal Article: The short term impact of a productive asset transfer in families with child labor: Experimental evidence from the Philippines (2020)
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