You Get What You Pay For: Schooling Incentives and Child Labor
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.
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Copy CitationEric V. Edmonds and Maheshwor Shrestha, "You Get What You Pay For: Schooling Incentives and Child Labor," NBER Working Paper 19279 (2013), https://doi.org/10.3386/w19279.Download Citation
Published Versions
Edmonds, Eric V. & Shrestha, Maheshwor, 2014. "You get what you pay for: Schooling incentives and child labor," Journal of Development Economics, Elsevier, vol. 111(C), pages 196-211. citation courtesy of 
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