This paper explores the impact of child labor on child welfare, with a specific focus on the relationship between working and education. I look at the empirical relationship between working and educational expenditure budget shares for children age 5-14 in Mexico. I accomplish this using a household fixed effects model and data from two waves of the Mexican Family Life Survey (MxFLS).
The results indicate that working increases school expenditure shares for working children. In particular, on average, girls engaged in paid work have total annual education expenditure shares that are 48.6% higher than girls who do not work. This relationship varies significantly with characteristics of both the individual and the household, including the child's gender and type of work performed, as well as the household's income, location, and relative female bargaining power. The results indicate that working does not appear to translate into a decrease in welfare and the additional expenditure is directed towards goods that improve the quality of education.
We use cookies to provide you with an optimal website experience. This includes cookies that are necessary for the operation of the site as well as cookies that are only used for anonymous statistical purposes, for comfort settings or to display personalized content. You can decide for yourself which categories you want to allow. Please note that based on your settings, you may not be able to use all of the site's functions.
Cookie settings
These necessary cookies are required to activate the core functionality of the website. An opt-out from these technologies is not available.
In order to further improve our offer and our website, we collect anonymous data for statistics and analyses. With the help of these cookies we can, for example, determine the number of visitors and the effect of certain pages on our website and optimize our content.