Determinants of Child Labor and School Attendance: The Role of Household Unobservables

Partha Deb and Furio Rosati

No 02/9, Economics Working Paper Archive at Hunter College from Hunter College Department of Economics

Abstract: We develop a semi-parametric latent class random effects multinomial logit model to distinguish between observed and unobserved household characteristics as determinants of child labor, school attendance and idleness. We find that much of the substitution between activities as a response to changes in covariates is between attending school and being idle, with work being rather resistant. Unobserved household heterogeneity is substantial and swamps observed income and wealth heterogeneity. A characterization of households into latent types reveals very different instrinsic propensities towards the three children's activities and that households with a high propensity to send their children to school are poorer and have less educated parents compared to households in the other classes.

Pages: 33 pages
Date: 2002
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dcm
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (34)

Downloads: (external link)
http://econ.hunter.cuny.edu/wp-content/uploads/sit ... HunterEconWP02-9.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:htr:hcecon:02/9

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Economics Working Paper Archive at Hunter College from Hunter College Department of Economics 695 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10065. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Jonathan Conning ().