Abstract
I assess the short-term impact of a public employment program on child labor and school attendance in Argentina. Public employment increases opportunities for adults outside the household, and may correspondingly raise the returns to children’s productive activities at home. The effect of public employment on school attendance may thus be small. However, I find that the program substantially increased children’s school attendance in addition to reducing child labor. My empirical strategy exploits an arbitrary enrollment cutoff date to compare program beneficiaries with a propensity-matched group of applicants not receiving benefits.JEL classificationJ22; J13; J68; 015
Highlights
The severe economic crisis that hit Argentina at the end of 2001 resulted in a doubling of poverty and extreme poverty
Matched differencein-differences estimates using a smaller panel sample confirm these results, suggesting program effects of 0.8 percentage points on child work and 1.8 percentage points on school attendance. These findings demonstrate that public employment can be effective at both reducing child work and increasing school attendance
8 Conclusion This study presents evidence that parents’ participation in the Jefas public employment program helped alleviate child labor and increase school attendance for children age 10–14 in Argentina
Summary
The severe economic crisis that hit Argentina at the end of 2001 resulted in a doubling of poverty and extreme poverty. The impact on children’s school attendance may be smaller for public employment than for CCTs. In this paper, I estimate the impact of Jefas on child work and school attendance for children ages 10–14 by comparing Jefas participants with a propensity-matched group of program applicants who were not receiving benefits. In this study I estimate impacts by comparing the outcomes for children in participant households (i.e. households that had enrolled in the Jefas program and were receiving benefits in Oct. 2002) with the outcomes of children in a propensity-matched group of applicant households (i.e. households that had applied to the program but were still on the waiting list at the time of the October 2002 survey) This strategy was previously used by Galasso and Ravallion (2004) to estimate the impact of the Jefas program on adult labor market outcomes.
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