Putting Kids Out of Work: Unintended Consequences of Child Labor Legislation in Bolivia

• Development Workshop

Date and Location

Tuesday, April 26, 2022, 4:10 PM - 5:30 PM
ARE Library Conference Room, 4101 Social Sciences and Humanities

Abstract

We study the effects of a Bolivian law that introduced benefits and
protections for child workers and lowered the de facto legal working age
from 14 to 10. We employ a difference-in-discontinuity approach that
exploits the variation in the law’s application to different age groups.
Work decreased for children under 14, whose work was newly legalized
and regulated under the law. We provide evidence that this was the
result of increased perceived costs of employing young children. Further,
we show that the law had no statistically significant impacts on the
riskiness of child work, hazardous work, or job-related injuries.