Is Child Labor Harmful? The Impact of Working Earlier in Life on Adult Earnings

Patrick Emerson () and André Souza

Economic Development and Cultural Change, 2011, vol. 59, issue 2, 345 - 385

Abstract: This paper explores the question: is working as a child harmful to an individual in terms of adult outcomes in earnings? Although this is an extremely important question, little is known about the effect of child labor on adult outcomes. Estimations of an instrumental variables earnings model on data from Brazil show that child labor has a large negative impact on adult earnings for male children even when controlling for schooling and that the negative impact of starting to work as a child reverses at around ages 12-14.

Date: 2011
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (50)

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/657125 (application/pdf)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/657125 (text/html)
Access to the online full text or PDF requires a subscription.

Related works:
Working Paper: Is Child Labor Harmful? The Impact of Working Earlier in Life on Adult Earnings (2007)
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:ucp:ecdecc:doi:10.1086/657125

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Economic Development and Cultural Change from University of Chicago Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Journals Division ().