Abstract
This paper uses longitudinal employment survey data to analyze the impact of household economic shocks on the schooling and employment transitions of young people in metropolitan Brazil. The paper uses data on over 100,000 children ages 10-16 from Brazil's Monthly Employment Survey (PME) from 1982 to 1999. Taking advantage of the rotating panels in the PME, we compare households in which the male household head becomes unemployed during a four-month period with households in which the head is continuously employed. Probit regressions indicate that an unemployment shock significantly increases the probability that a child enters the labor force, drops out of school, and fails to advance in school. The effects can be large, implying increases of as much as 50% in the probability of entering employment for 16-year-old girls. In contrast, shocks occurring after the school year do not have significant effects, suggesting that these results are not due to unobserved characteristics of households that experience unemployment shocks. The results suggest that some households are not able to absorb short-run economic shocks, with negative consequences for children.
Original language | English (US) |
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Pages (from-to) | 188-214 |
Number of pages | 27 |
Journal | Journal of Development Economics |
Volume | 84 |
Issue number | 1 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Sep 2007 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:This research was supported by a grant from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development of the U.S. National Institutes of Health, Grant Number R01-HD31214. Excellent research assistance was provided by Jasper Hoek. This paper does not necessarily express the views of the Inter-American Development Bank or its Board of Directors.
Keywords
- Brazil
- Child labor
- Schooling
- Shocks