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Title: Child Labor Legislation: Effective, Benign, Both or Neither?

Citation Type: Miscellaneous

Publication Year: 2009

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Abstract: ABSTRACT. Between 1880 and 1930, the employment rate of children ages 10 to 15 decreased by over 75% inthe U.S. economy. During this period, several U.S. states dictated state-wide child labor legislation that imposedminimum age restrictions for employment in the manufacturing sector. The objective of this paper is to characterizewhether this child labor legislation contributed to the decline in children labor market participation.Previous literature on this topic, such as Moehling [10] and Moehling [11], has utilized dierence-in-dierenceestimation techniques to study the eectiveness of the child labor legislation in reducing child labor. We contributeto this literature in two ways. First, we show that, under the presence of general equilibrium eects such as the onesdescribed by Basu and Van [3], dierence-in-dierence estimation techniques can provide a misleading measure ofthe eectiveness of the legislation. Second, in addition to evaluating whether the legislation was eective or not,we analyze the labor market mechanism by which this takes place. This analysis may allow us to establish if thelegislation constituted a benign policy or not, that is, whether the legislation imposed constraints to the behaviorof children (not benign) or whether it generated a change in labor market equilibrium (benign).We ?nd that child labor legislation was eective in reducing general employment levels for boys and girls. Moreover,we ?nd that the legislation was benign for general employment level for girls. We also show that the legislationwas ineective in reducing child labor participation in the manufacturing sector.

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Authors: Bugni, Federico A.

Publisher: Duke University

Data Collections: IPUMS USA

Topics: Labor Force and Occupational Structure, Other

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