Essays on the Economic History of the family
- Autores: Juan Manuel Puerta Vílchez
- Directores de la Tesis: Hans Joachim Voth (dir. tes.)
- Lectura: En la Universitat Pompeu Fabra ( España ) en 2011
- Idioma: español
- Tribunal Calificador de la Tesis: Maria Libertad González Luna (presid.), Nezih Guner (secret.), Alfonso Herranz Loncán (voc.)
- Materias:
- Enlaces
- Tesis en acceso abierto en: TDX e-Repositori UPF
- Resumen
This thesis studies the economic effects of child labor and compulsory schooling laws (CLLs and CSLs). In the first two chapters I study the consequences of the enactment of CSLs on education and fertility. I use a combination of a difference-in-difference (DID) methodology with an identification strategy based on legislative borders to find that the laws increased enrollment by 7% and educational attainment by about 0.3 years of education over the long run. As for fertility, I find that CSLs imply a contemporaneous reduction in fertility of about 15%. In the long run, women that received compulsory education were expected to have approximately 0.15 to 0.3 fewer children. In the third chapter of this dissertation I look at the effect of CLLs on industrial performance. I find that industries that initially relied extensively on child labor suffered a significant reduction in growth as a consequence of the social legislation. I conjecture that the potentially sizable but narrowly concentrated effects of CLLs could explain why child labor is still common in the developing world today.
