Anticipating unintended consequences of policy: Learnings from Indonesia's child labor reform

Elghafiky Bimardhika and Firman Witoelar

Departmental Working Papers from The Australian National University, Arndt-Corden Department of Economics

Abstract: We study the causal effects of a labor law that governs child workers on labor market outcomes and the well-being of individuals. We exploit the timing of the national legislation to identify the causal effects of child labor reform using the Regression Discontinuity Design. We find that individuals who entered adulthood after the reform are less likely to have participated in the labor market during childhood. The reform also lowers the likelihood of poor health and improves the probability of working in paid jobs when children have reached adulthood. Our heterogeneity analysis highlights the importance of complementing regulation with enforcement and support programs to minimize unintended consequences that plagued many similar reforms.

JEL-codes: C21 I15 I25 J08 J21 J80 O15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 97 pages
Date: 2025
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev, nep-hea, nep-lab and nep-sea
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://crawford-prod.anu.edu.au/sites/default/fil ... %20Feb%202025-04.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:pas:papers:2025-04

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Departmental Working Papers from The Australian National University, Arndt-Corden Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Prema-chandra Athukorala ().