The macroeconomics of child labor regulation

By Matthias Doepke, Fabrizio Zilibotti. 2005

250 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We develop a positive theory of the adoption of child labor laws. Workers who compete with children in the labor market support a child labor ban, unless their own working children provide a large fraction of family income. Fertility decisions lock agents into specific political preferences, and multiple steady states can arise. The introduction of child labor laws can be triggered by skill-biased technological change, which induces parents to choose smaller families. The theory can account for the observation that, in Britain, regulations were first introduced after a period of rising wage inequality, and coincided with rapid fertility decline.

Subfields: Gender Studies, Safety Research, Soil Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/086b678fd88aec853a8ce9ed538d5a7f4de53057

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Citations in the corpus

Inequality in Landownership, the Emergence of Human-Capital Promoting Institutions, and the Great Divergence (2009, unknown): “��t = argmax[(1 �t)�yt] � [h(�t�yt)]1 �� 1 � t+1 ; ( 28 )”
Child Labor and Household Wealth: Theory and Empirical Evidence of an Inverted-U (2007, unknown): “Hence, we have the first-order condition: x · fe = c. ( 6 )”
Inequality, Human Capital Formation and the Process of Development (2011, unknown): “Mutually benecial reforms are also considered by Lizzeri and Persico (2004) and Doepke and Zilibotti (2005).”
From Stagnation to Growth: Unified Growth Theory (2004, unknown): “Suppose that there are no property rights over land.(84) The return to land is therefore zero, and the wage per efficiency unit of labor is therefore equal to the output per efficiency unit of labor.”
Das Human Kapital: A Theory of the Demise of the Class Structure (2004, background): “Mutually beneficial reforms are also considered by Lizzeri and Persico (2004) and Doepke and Zilibotti (2005).”
Poverty Alleviation and Child Labor (2008, background): “Understanding economic influences on child time allocation is important for the political economy of child labor regulation, and for the design of child labor related policy (Doepke and Zilibotti 2005).”
Women’s rights and development (2013, unknown): “(1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (7) (8) (9) (10) (11) (12)”
Supplemental Notes to "Demographic transition and industrial revolution: A macroeconomic investigation" (2009, background): “Among the studies allowing for an important role of mortality in driving the demographic and/or economic transition are Ehrlich and Lui (1991), Wolpin (1997), Eckstein et al. (1999), Kalemli-Ozcan et al.”
The Demographic Transition and the Emergence of Sustained Economic Growth (2005, background): “…the importance of human capital in the production process induced industrialists to support education reforms (Galor and Moav 2003, 2004) and thus laws that abolish child labor (Doepke and Zilibotti 2003), triggering a reduction in child labor and thus in fertility.12 The Rise in Life Expectancy.”