Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/202720 
Year of Publication: 
2019
Series/Report no.: 
IZA Discussion Papers No. 12374
Publisher: 
Institute of Labor Economics (IZA), Bonn
Abstract: 
This paper evaluates the effect of a free compulsory education reform in rural China on the incidence of child labor. We exploit the cross-province variation in the roll-out of the reform and apply a difference-in-differences strategy to identify the causal effects of the reform. We find that the exposure to the free compulsory education significantly reduces the incidence of child labor for boys, but has no significant effect on the likelihood of child labor for girls. Specifically, one additional semester of free compulsory education decreases the incidence of child labor for boys by 8.3 percentage points. Moreover, the negative effect of the reform on the likelihood of child labor is stronger for boys from households with lower socioeconomic status. Finally, the free compulsory education reform may induce parents to reallocate resources towards boys within a household and thus may enlarge the gender gap in human capital investment.
Subjects: 
child labor
free compulsory education reform
son preference
rural China
JEL: 
I28
I38
O20
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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