Child Labor, Home Production and the Family Labor Supply

Abstract

This paper studies the time allocation of all family members, including the children, where it is assumed that parents distribute their time between market work and household work, and the children may work in the labor market, do the household chores or study. In this framework, I propose that wages and shadow prices play an important role in the allocation of time of household members. Since empirical papers cannot find a clear relationship between child labor, wages and exogenous income, the theoretical model presented here sheds light on the relationship between those variables.