Perverse Consequences of Well Intentioned Regulation: Evidence from India's Child Labor Ban

Prashant Bharadwaj, Leah Lakdawala and Nicholas Li

No 19602, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: While bans against child labor are a common policy tool, there is very little empirical evidence validating their effectiveness. In this paper, we examine the consequences of India's landmark legislation against child labor, the Child Labor (Prohibition and Regulation) Act of 1986. Using data from employment surveys conducted before and after the ban, and using age restrictions that determined who the ban applied to, we show that child wages decrease and child labor increases after the ban. These results are consistent with a theoretical model building on the seminal work of Basu and Van (1998) and Basu (2005), where families use child labor to reach subsistence constraints and where child wages decrease in response to bans, leading poor families to utilize more child labor. The increase in child labor comes at the expense of reduced school enrollment. We also examine the effects of the ban at the household level. Using linked consumption and expenditure data, we find that along various margins of household expenditure, consumption, calorie intake and asset holdings, households are worse off after the ban.

JEL-codes: J08 O1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hme and nep-lab
Note: CH DEV
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (17)

Published as Prashant Bharadwaj & Leah K Lakdawala & Nicholas Li, 2020. "Perverse Consequences of Well Intentioned Regulation: Evidence from India’s Child Labor Ban," Journal of the European Economic Association, vol 18(3), pages 1158-1195.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w19602.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Perverse Consequences of Well Intentioned Regulation: Evidence from India’s Child Labor Ban (2020)
Working Paper: PERVERSE CONSEQUENCES OF WELL-INTENTIONED REGULATION: EVIDENCE FROM INDIA’S CHILD LABOR BAN (2016)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:19602

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w19602

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().