El debate acerca de la falta de regionalización en los ofidios

To examine the effect of the CRA on child labor, I study changes in employment at both the extensive and intensive margins, and look at three different types of work; (1) household chores, (2) work for a household farm or enterprise, or (3) work outside the household. As discussed in Section 2, the CRA penalized firms and individuals for employing children outside their household.

Table 2.4 reports the DDD coefficients from specification (3.11). Here, any time trend specific to the treatment states is differenced out. The key identifying assump- tion is that any treatment state specific trend is the same for children under 12, and children 12 and older. The results show the effect of the CRA on weekly hours in work outside the household, chores, and for a household enterprise or farm. Odd numbered columns include separate state and year fixed effects, while in even num- bered columns, state-year fixed effects are included as well. The sample includes all children age 6-15. The object of interest is found in the first row, which corresponds to βDDD in equation (3.11). The results here suggest work outside the household in- creased in response to the CRA. More specifically, the results in column (2) suggest that on average, children age 6-11 are working 0.343 hours more per week outside the household, which is equivalent to a 24 percent increase above the pretreatment control group mean. This seemingly counterintuitive result is consistent with the Basu and Van (1998) model of child labor. A plausible explanation for this result is that the CRA lowered child wages, resulting in families falling further below some subsistence level of consumption. To compensate for the lost income, households responded by sending their children to work for longer hours.

Furthermore, columns (3) and (4) show that child hours worked in chores increased roughly 2 hours per week. What explains this large increase? A ban on work outside the household lowers wages in that sector, and therefore impacts the benefits of work- ing outside the household relative to participating in work in chores, or for household enterprises or farms. Children should then reallocate their labor to chores and work

in household enterprises or farms until wages equalize in all sectors.22 Secondly, the CRA only applied to work outside the household, making this transition in sectors more likely. The lack of any impact of the CRA on work in household enterprises or farms, and the fact that work outside the household increased, suggests that there are likely labor market frictions preventing this reallocation.

Table 2.5presents a similar specification to what is found in Table2.4, except now the treatment variable is interacted with age dummies, as opposed to an indicator for whether the child is below age 12. The reference category is the interaction between treatment and children age 12. The results demonstrate that most of the effect of the law is concentrated among the youngest children. In particular, the results suggest that on average, children age 6 are working 0.571 more hours outside the household per week after the implementation of the CRA after differencing out time effects and changes in hours worked among 12 year olds in treated states. On the other hand, the CRA seems to have had little effect on the difference in hours worked between 11 and 12 year olds in treated and untreated states. This could be because labor hours for the younger children were so low to begin with that they had more room to grow. Alternatively, this could simply be because children age 11 look similar to 12 year old children, and therefore the law did not affect differences in treatment between them. Table 2.6, like Table 2.4, presents results from specification (3.11). However, the sample is now limited to states that have at any point adopted the CRA, and the results rely on variation in the timing of adoption. The treated states are defined as any state that adopted the law between 2007 and 2010, while control states consist of any state that adopted the CRA prior to 2007. The motivation behind this subsample analysis is to eliminate any unobserved differences between the treated and never treated states specific to different age groups. The results here are mostly consistent with the results presented in Table 2.4; on average, children age 6-11 are working 0.369 hours more per week outside the household, which is nearly identical to the corresponding estimate in Table 4. The magnitude of the effect on chores is slightly smaller, with children age 6-11 working 1.723 hours more per week as a result of the

CRA.

Moving to the extensive margin of employment, Table 2.7 presents probit esti- mates of equation (3.11) where the dependent variables are indicators for whether the child did any of the three types of work during the previous week. The given coefficients represent the marginal effects on the binary employment outcomes. The results again suggest that the CRA increased work outside the household. In partic- ular, employment outside of the household is increased by 4.1 percentage points for children under age 12 who were exposed to the CRA. Why might children who were not previously working now begin working after a decrease in child wages? Imagine a 9 year old child with an employed 11 year old sibling. Now that the older sibling has lower wages, the household decides to both increase the 11 year olds hours, and send the 9 year old to work as well. Studies without hourly employment data have relied on this mechanism to analyze the employment effects of child labor laws. For example, Bharadwaj et al. (2013) examines the 1986 Child Labor (Prohibition and Regulation) Act in India using National Sample Survey employment data, which only contains information on whether or not the child works (in addition to child wages). Their model suggests that child employment will change as a result of changes in sib- ling wages. Thus, they categorize a child as treated if the child has a sibling under the minimum age of work, and see how this law affects child employment at the extensive margin. My results are consistent with their findings.