Children's Work and Mothers' Work - What is the Connection?

Deborah Levison, University of Minnesota
Deborah S. DeGraff, Bowdoin College

Does employment of mothers in poor countries pull children into the labor force? This question has not been explored in literatures on women’s employment and on child labor. In much of the developing world, statistics show fairly rapid increases in women’s labor force participation. A priori, it is not clear whether this trend has any effect on children’s work activities. There is a long history of analyzing the determinants of women’s employment and, more recently, a sizeable literature has focused on child labor. However, while studies of women’s employment often include measures of household composition, they do not explicitly consider the activities of children as being jointly determined with those of the women. Similarly, studies of child work and schooling typically control for exogenous characteristics of the mother, but do not jointly model her employment status. We examine the relationship between children’s and mothers’ employment using 2001 data from Brazil.