Intrinsic Competition and the Labor-Schooling Trade-off in Uganda Competition in Child Labor and Schooling Decision Making in Uganda. Evidence from a Bivariate Probit Model

Bernhard Ganglmair
Additional contact information
Bernhard Ganglmair: Bonn Graduate School of Economics

Labor and Demography from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: I argue that a households interdependent decisions over their childrens labor and school activities are not only a function of observable hard facts but also of its intrinsic values and beliefs. Applying econometric methods, after all observable factors have been controlled for, the degree to which these joint decisions over these two activities are correlated can be seen as the intrinsic competition households and children face. This coefficient of the labor-school trade-off is not associated with any observable variables and should therefore be object of future research in the field. In the empirical study, quite recent and hardly discussed data from Uganda is used for the joint estimation of child labor and school attendance applying a bivariate probit model. The results shed light on the degree of the unobserved or intrinsic competition between labor and school attendance. Results implying a stronger trade-off between these two decisions in urban than rural areas and stronger for girls than for boys are obtained. Especially rural boys have a considerably higher tendency to combine their labor activities with schooling while the obtained trade-off implies for girls to specialize. Results seem to be driven by unobserved cost-related factors, no clear explanation on this, however, is found.

Keywords: child labor; school attendance; decision trade-off; simultaneous time allocation decision; bivariate probit; Uganda (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C35 J82 O15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 27 pages
Date: 2005-04-12, Revised 2005-09-21
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dcm and nep-ure
Note: Type of Document - pdf; pages: 27
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://econwpa.ub.uni-muenchen.de/econ-wp/lab/papers/0504/0504002.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wpa:wuwpla:0504002

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Labor and Demography from University Library of Munich, Germany
Bibliographic data for series maintained by EconWPA ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).