Working Paper: NBER ID: w19279
Authors: Eric V. Edmonds; Maheshwor Shrestha
Abstract: 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.
Keywords: child labor; education incentives; conditional transfers
JEL Codes: J22; J88; O15
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| scholarship treatment (I22) | increase in school enrollment (I21) |
| scholarship treatment (I22) | decrease in carpet weaving (O14) |
| stipend treatment (M52) | increase in school attendance (I21) |
| stipend treatment (M52) | decrease in child involvement in weaving (J13) |
| increase in school attendance (I21) | decrease in child labor (J88) |
| scholarship treatment (I22) | temporary effects on school attendance and child labor (J22) |