Title: Free Education Helps Combat Child Labor?

Speaker: Professor Zhong Zhao, Renmin University of China

Time: March 14th, 2018 13:30–14:45

Venue: Conference Room 106B, Zhonghui Building (College of Economics, JNU)

Abstract:

This paper evaluates the effect of a free compulsory education reform in rural China on child labor incidence. 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 8.1 percentage points. Moreover, the free compulsory education reform may induce parents to reallocate resources towards boys within a household.