School Attendance and Child Labor - A Model of Collective Behavior

Abstract

This paper investigates how community attitudes affect school attendance and child labor and how aggregate behavior of the community feeds back towards the formation and persistence of an anti- (or pro-) schooling norm. The proposed community-model continues to take aggregate and idiosyncratic poverty into account as an important driver of absence from school. But it provides also an explanation for why equally poor villages or regions can display different attitudes towards schooling. Distinguishing between three different modes of child time allocation, school attendance, work, and leisure, the paper shows how the time costs of schooling and child labor productivity contribute to the existence of a locally stable anti-schooling norm and how policy can exploit social dynamics and help a community to escape permanently from low attendance at school and child labor.

Keywords: School Attendance, Child Labor, Social Norms, Targeted Transfers

JEL Classification: I20, I29, J13, O12