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Agricultural calendars and the school year: Timing, child labor, and schooling

Crawford School of Public Policy
Photo by Hippopx

Event details

ACDE Seminar

Date & time

Tuesday 02 November 2021
2.00pm–3.30pm

Venue

Online via Zoom

Speaker

Josh Merfeld, KDI School of Public Policy and Management

In developing countries, agricultural productivity shocks are an important predictor of the opportunity cost of time for children. This can lead to children dropping out of school to work during good rainfall years. However, this trade-off between current and future income is most salient only when the agricultural season and the school year overlap. In this paper, I show that this overlap is an important mediator of the effect of agricultural productivity shocks on both child labor and school enrollment, in particular the overlap between harvest and the school year. While positive rainfall shocks lead to higher levels of child labor, this effect is attenuated by longer overlap between harvest and the school year and the attenuation is largest when the overlap is within the first 30 days of the school year. For school enrollment, positive rainfall shocks lead to higher levels of enrollment and this effect is attenuated by overlap between harvest and the school year, but this pattern only exists when that overlap happens during the first 30 days of the school year.

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