Can health-insurance help prevent child labor? An impact evaluation from Pakistan

Andreas Landmann and Markus Frölich ()

Journal of Health Economics, 2015, vol. 39, issue C, 51-59

Abstract: Child labor is a common consequence of economic shocks in developing countries. We show that reducing vulnerability can affect child labor outcomes. We exploit the extension of a health and accident insurance scheme by a Pakistani microfinance institution that was set up as a randomized controlled trial and accompanied by household panel surveys. Together with increased coverage the microfinance institution offered assistance with claim procedures in treatment branches. We find lower incidence of child labor, hazardous occupations and child labor earnings caused by the innovation. Boys are more often engaged in child labor in our sample, but also seem to profit more from the insurance innovation.

Keywords: Child labor; Health insurance; Microinsurance; Vulnerability; Pakistan (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I13 J20 J82 O12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (23)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167629614001192
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

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:eee:jhecon:v:39:y:2015:i:c:p:51-59

DOI: 10.1016/j.jhealeco.2014.10.003

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Health Economics is currently edited by J. P. Newhouse, A. J. Culyer, R. Frank, K. Claxton and T. McGuire

More articles in Journal of Health Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().