Climate Variability, Child Labour and Schooling: Evidence on the Intensive and Extensive Margin

Abstract

How does future income uncertainty a↵ect child labour and human capital accumulation? Using a unique panel dataset, we examine the e↵ect of changes in climate variability on the allocation of time among child labour activities (the intensive margin) as well as participation in education and labour activities (the extensive margin). We find robust evidence that increased climate variability increases the number of hours spent on farming activities while reducing the number of hours spent on domestic chores, indicating a substitution of time across child labour activities. In addition, we find no evidence of climate variability on enrolment decisions or educational outcomes, suggesting that households may spread the burden of labour across children to minimise its impact on formal education. (JEL: D13, O12, J13, J22, Q54.) 1First draft: June 2012. Colmer: Grantham Research Institute and Department of Geography and Environment, London School of Economics, Houghton Street, London, WC2A 2AE, UK. E-mail address: j.m.colmer@lse.ac.uk. I am grateful to Gharad Bryan, Antoine Dechezlepretre, Jon de Quidt, Greg Fisher, Maitreesh Ghatak, Ben Groom, Sol Hsiang, Rob Jensen, Kyle Meng, Anthony Millner, Eric Neumayer, Munir Squires and seminar audiences at the London School of Economics, Columbia University, the EfD 6th Annual Meeting, the 20th Annual Conference of the European Association of Environmental and Resource Economics, and the European Economic Association, for helpful thoughts, comments and discussions. This work was supported by the ESRC Centre for Climate Change Economics and Policy and the Grantham Foundation. The data used in this article were collected by the University of Addis Ababa, the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), and the Centre for the Study of African Economies (CSAE). Funding for the ERHS survey was provided by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), the Swedish International Development Agency (SIDA) and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). All errors and omissions are my own.