Working Paper: CEPR ID: DP8886
Authors: Emla Fitzsimons; Alice Mesnard
Abstract: This paper investigates how the permanent departure of the father from the household affects children?s school enrolment and work participation in rural Colombia. Our results show that departure of the father decreases children?s school enrolment by around 4 percentage points, and increases child labour by 3 percentage points. After using household fixed effects to deal with time-invariant unobserved heterogeneity, and providing evidence suggesting strongly that estimates are not biased by time varying unobserved heterogeneity, we also exploit an interesting feature of our setting, a conditional cash transfer programme in place, and show that it counteracts the adverse effects. This, and other pieces of evidence we give, strongly suggests that the channel through which departure affects children is through reducing income. It also highlights the important safety net role played by such welfare programmes, in particular for very disadvantaged households, who are unlikely to find formal or informal ways of insuring themselves against such vagaries.
Keywords: child labour; conditional cash transfer; credit and insurance market failures; income loss; permanent departure; safety net; schooling
JEL Codes: I20; J12; J22; O16
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| Father's permanent departure (J12) | Income loss (J17) |
| Income loss (J17) | Children's school enrolment (I21) |
| Income loss (J17) | Child labour (J82) |
| Conditional cash transfer programme (H53) | Adverse effects on schooling (I21) |
| Conditional cash transfer programme (H53) | Increased child labour (J82) |
| Father's permanent departure (J12) | Children's school enrolment (I21) |
| Father's permanent departure (J12) | Child labour (J82) |