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Child Labor and the Interaction between the Quantity and Quality of Children
Author(s) -
Fan C. Simon
Publication year - 2004
Publication title -
southern economic journal
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.762
H-Index - 58
eISSN - 2325-8012
pISSN - 0038-4038
DOI - 10.1002/j.2325-8012.2004.tb00621.x
Subject(s) - fertility , economics , quality (philosophy) , wage rate , wage , labour economics , intervention (counseling) , government (linguistics) , demographic economics , economic interventionism , psychology , sociology , demography , political science , population , philosophy , linguistics , epistemology , psychiatry , politics , law
This article analyzes the impacts of child labor on the interaction between the quantity and quality of children in the spirit of Becker and Lewis. It shows that, without child labor, the quantity of children can be a normal good so that it increases with parental income under some fairly standard formulations. However, the correlation between fertility and parental income becomes negative when the role of child labor is considered. The model also implies that fertility increases with the wage rate of child labor. Moreover, it suggests that government intervention not only directly affects the supply of child labor but also influences parents' decisions on fertility, which indirectly determines children's labor market participations.