Abstract |
Child labor is an issue of growing importance in development economics. The focus is centered on the underlying causes of child labor and the relationships between child labor and household decisions. Few papers attempt to capture children's contribution to families' income. The near absence of child labor markets complicates the estimation of child labor value. In fact, most child laborers are involved in self-employed agriculture and our approach will rely on this feature to estimate children's contribution through the labor elasticity of household agricultural production. With a production function approach, we will treat endogeneity using a first-difference model, which utilizes the division of data between two cropping seasons in an Ugandan dataset. We use data on two cropping seasons to eliminate household fixed effects from our production functions thus, obtaining consistent estimates of children's contribution to household agriculture. Using the labor elasticity of household production, we evaluate the value of children's time and the obtained estimates will serve in the calculation of their overall contribution to household income, including agricultural and domestic labor. Uganda, with a high prevalence of child labor and the importance of the agricultural sector, is a ideal country to study child labor and the impact of children in household income.
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