You Get What You Pay For: Schooling Incentives and Child Labor / Eric V. Edmonds, Maheshwor Shrestha.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Edmonds, Eric V.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Shrestha, Maheshwor.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w19279.

NBER working paper series no. w19279

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Other Title:

You Get What You Pay For

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2013.

Summary:

Can efforts to promote education deter child labor? We report on the findings of a field experiment where a conditional transfer incentivized the schooling of children associated with carpet factories in Nepal. We find that schooling increases and child involvement in carpet weaving decreases when schooling is incentivized. As a simple static labor supply model would predict, we observe that treated children resort to their counterfactual level of school attendance and carpet weaving when schooling is no longer incentivized. From a child labor policy perspective, our findings imply that "You get what you pay for" when schooling incentives are used to combat hazardous child labor.

Notes:

Print version record

August 2013.