The economics of schooling and child labor for boys and girls in rural households in El Salvador: 1995--1999

In this dissertation I analyze the effects of individual characteristics, such as age and gender, the demographic structure or composition of the household or family, the education of the father and the mother, per capita net income and remittances, land ownership, and distance to primary and secondary schools, on school attendance and the age-grade distortion or overage as a proxy for school performance, and for child labor in farm activities and household chores inside the house, and child labor outside the house, in rural households in El Salvador, for 1995, 1997, and 1999. In the case of overage I also assessed the effects of school quality by including the type of school that children are attending. The underlying analytical framework is the human capital approach, under a unitary household model for demand of education and child labor. The econometric methodology involves random-effects probit models for each of the five outcomes.The study takes into account gender issues including a dummy variable representing gender, but also estimating separate equations for boys and girls, looking at the demographic structure of the household, and identifying the education of the father and the mother. The results show that there is no gender gap in the probabilities of school attendance and overage, but explanatory variables such as education of the father and the mother, per capita net income and land ownership have different effects on boys and girls regarding these outcomes. On the other hand, there is a clear division of labor within the household, girls tending to specialize in household chores, and boys in farm labor activities and labor outside the house.The models are sensitive to the year of estimation. I found that the econometric results were very different in 1997, which was a poor agricultural year, compared to 1995 and 1999, which were good agricultural years. The economic structure of the household regarding decisions about schooling and child labor changes depends on the economic and climatic environment, and therefore policymakers and researchers should be careful to take such changes into account.