fiscal policy expectation traps and child labor i introduction child labor is widespread in the contemporary world in fact the international labor organization ilo estimates that 246 million of the world s children aged 5 17 or 16 are child laborers most living in developing countries 1 recently there has been renewed interest in this topic among economists which has led to a series of theoretical studies with the aim of better understanding the causes and consequences of child labor in order to help guide appropriate policy responses as in grootaert and kanbur 1995 basu 1999 and basu and tzannatos 2003 for useful literature surveys typically theoretical models designed to address the important policy issues surrounding child labor posit that a family s decision to send a child to the labor market is taken only as a last resort in order to escape the dire consequences of poverty for example basu and van 1998 baland and robinson 2000 show that this response on the part of the family may be stronger in a dynamic setting because contracts between children and adults are not self enforcing and capital markets are incomplete 2 in this case an adult decision maker may not only send their children to work to escape poverty in the present but do so to escape poverty in the future as well this decision will hinder a child s ability to accumulate human capital and can lead to persistent cycles of poverty and child labor across generations 3 we begin by showing that a benevolent government can address the incidence of child labor that results from the non enforceability of intergenerational contracts and incomplete capital markets through the appropriate use of fiscal policy and that this policy is pareto improving it is then shown that if society s confidence in their government is incomplete this lack of confidence can render the same fiscal policy ineffective in other words if households do not believe that the government will follow through on their policy promise then in fact it is quite possible that the government will not be able to follow through on their promise as a result of these beliefs 4 this self reinforcing nature of fiscal policy in the presence of uncertainty can leave a country in an expectations trap with a low level of human capital and child labor 5 to formally demonstrate this fiscal policy expectations trap hypothesis we employ a three period overlapping generations model in which child labor exists 6 this stylized setup will keep the dynamics manageable and allow us to highlight the effects of uncertainty also within this framework we introduce a missing intergenerational contracts market in conjunction with a human capital production function that exhibits a threshold with respect to parental human capital which gives rise to two locally stable steady states there is a good equilibrium where there is a relatively high level of parental human capital which results in a high level of income and no child labor and there is a bad equilibrium where there is a relatively low level of parental human capital which results in a low level of income and positive child labor this low income child labor equilibrium is the standard poverty trap scenario that typically exists in a deterministic economy with multiple equilibria it is then shown that a benevolent government can replicate the missing intergenerational contracts market with a pay as you go social security program thereby eliminating this component of child labor in an economy with perfect foresight in addition it is also shown that this policy is pareto improving in the sense that all generations are strictly better off under this policy except the initial old who are no worse off the dynamics of this social security program are intuitive if child labor is one possible mechanism adults can use to redistribute resources from their children then the government can reduce this incentive by announcing a social security program that will begin during the current adults old age an institutional intergenerational contract

retirement in dual career families a structural model a structural econometric model of retirement of dual career couples is specified and estimated with panel data from the national longitudinal survey of mature women a coincidence of spouses retiring together despite the younger ages of wives suggests explicit efforts at coordination the estimates suggest that one reason is a correlation of tastes for leisure more important each spouse and perhaps husbands in particular values retirement more once their spouse has retired the opportunity set accounts for peaks in the retirement hazards of each spouse individually but not for peaks in the simultaneous retirement of both spouses

the effect of fair trade affiliation on child schooling evidence from a sample of chilean honey producers we evaluate the impact of fair trade ft affiliation on child schooling within a sample of chilean honey producers with a retrospective panel data approach from a theoretical point of view we argue that ft should have a positive effect on child schooling since it generates a short run pure income effect together with a medium run productivity effect on both adult and child wages on the other hand because of the higher productivity generated by the medium run effect the opportunity cost of child education increases if they work with their parents the direction of the impact of ft affiliation on child schooling is therefore uncertain and requires empirical testing our econometric findings document a positive and significant impact of affiliation years on child schooling after controlling for endogeneity and heterogeneity between the treatment and control sample

child labor and the labor supply of other household members evidence from 1920 america this paper analyses the effect of child labor on household labor supply using 1920 us census micro data the aim of the analysis is to understand who in the household benefits from child labor in order to identify a source of exogenous variation in child labor i use state specific child labor laws i find that a rise in the proportion of working children by household is associated with no variation in parents labor supply i also find a strong negative externality among children as the proportion of working children by household rises everything else equal the probability that each child works falls while the probability that he attends school rises this suggests that parents redistribute entirely the returns from child labor to the children in the household consistent with a model of household labor supply with fully altruistic parents

job exit behavior of older men a dynamic programming model of job exit behavior and retirement is constructed and estimated using the method of simulated moments the model and estimation method allow for both unobserved individual effects and unobserved job specific match effects the model is estimated using two different assumptions about individual discount factors first a static model with the discount factor equal to zero is estimated then a dynamic model with the discount factor equal to 95 is estimated in both models it is found that bad health age and lack of education increase the probability of retirement the dynamic model performs better than the static model and has different implications for retirement behavior the job specific effects are an important source of unobserved heterogeneity copyright 1991 by the econometric society

weathering the storms credit receipt and child labor in the aftermath of the great floods 1998 in bangladesh summary in this paper we use data from a unique survey conducted in the aftermath of the 1998 floods in bangladesh to examine how the household shock child labor relationship is affected by credit receipts of households adopting the ratio of assets lost due to the floods as a likely exogenous shock proxy we find that child labor increases with the magnitude of the shock but only if households do not receive credit this suggests that following shocks child labor may be a response to non availability of credit the policy implication suggests a distinct and alternative channel in combating the economic incentives behind child labor access to credit diminishes the immediate financial burden on constrained households reducing their need for child labor

child labor and schooling response to changes in coca production in rural peru abstract coca eradication and interdiction are the most common policies aimed at reducing the production and distribution of cocaine in the andes but little is know about their impact on households this paper uses the shift in the production of coca leaves from peru to colombia in 1995 to analyze the indirect effects of the anti coca policy on children s allocation of time after different sensitivity checks the results indicate that a decrease in coca production is associated with increases in work and hours children living in coca growing states devote to work within and outside the household with no effects on schooling outcomes these findings suggest a previously undocumented indirect effect of drug policies on household behavior

the economics of child labor if child labor as a mass phenomenon occurs not because of parental selfishness but because of the parents concern for the household s survival the popular argument for banning child labor loses much of its force however this assumption about parental decision making coupled with the assumption of substitutability in production between child and adult labor could result in multiple equilibria in the labor market with one equilibrium where children work and another where adult wage is high and children do not work the paper establishes this result and discusses its policy implications copyright 1998 by american economic association

malnutrition and child labor in pre industrial and developing economies it is common to find i entire families including children working together in family farms or urban factories and ii a positive link between a person s consumption and her productivity this paper argues that there is a natural reason for the concurrence of i and ii as a rule households are characterized by intra household altruism an increase in the income of an individual increases the consumption of all household members hence when an employer pays an adult worker a high wage to enhance her productivity part of it ends up augmenting her children s consumption and productivity one way for the employer to prevent this leakage and internalize the externality is to employ the children as well this explains the higher incidence of family labor in poor societies where ii is more likely to be true

health insurance and retirement of married couples summary most health insurance in the usa is provided by employers until eligibility for public health insurance medicare begins at age 65 retiring before 65 exposes workers who lack retiree health insurance coverage to the risk of catastrophic medical expenditure we solve and estimate a dynamic model of the employment behavior of older married couples that includes risky medical expenditure and health insurance parameter estimates imply that the risk reducing feature of health insurance can account for about half of the observed association between retiree health insurance and employment for married men but can account for only one tenth of the much larger observed association for married women policy simulations imply very small effects on employment of changing the age of eligibility for medicare from 65 to 67 copyright 2006 john wiley sons ltd

in the same boat but not equals the heterogeneous effects of parental income on child labour this paper examines the impact of parental income on child labour the empirical literature has found conflicting results regarding whether poverty leads parents to send their children to work mos

child labor school attendance and intrahousehold gender bias in brazil an extensive survey data set of brazilian households is used to test whether intrahousehold gender bias affects the decisions of mothers and fathers to send their sons and daughters to work and to school an intrahousehold allocation model is examined in which fathers and mothers may affect the education investment and the child labor participation of their sons and daughters differently because of differences in parental preferences or differences in how additional schooling affects son s and daughter s acquisition of human capital brazilian household survey data for 1998 are used to estimate the impact of each parent s education on the labor market participation and school attendance of their sons and daughters for labor market participation the father s education has a greater negative impact than the mother s education on the labor status of sons the father s education also has a greater impact on son s labor status than on daughter s for schooling decisions the mother s education has a greater positive impact than the father s education on daughter s school attendance but fathers have a greater positive impact on sons school attendance than on daughter s

the effect of incentive induced retirement on spousal retirement rates evidence from a natural experiment we identify quantify and explain the impact of incentive induced early retirement er of husbands on their wives probability to retire within 1 year using administrative data from the netherlands our identification strategy is based on a policy intervention by which targeted individuals working at the central government level became unexpectedly and temporarily eligible for very generous er benefits this retirement window of opportunity implied for interested workers that transitions from the current job into full retirement had to be effected swiftly and irreversibly we find that induced er of husbands increased their wives probability to retire by 10 percentage points this is a strong and robust local average treatment effect partly the effect runs through wives at ages when they may have been eligible for er programs themselves jel c26 j26 j120 j140

retirement of spouses and social security reform abstract the retirement decisions of spouses may be interdependent for various reasons similarity of tastes joint assets sharing rules for income and housework or complementarity of leisure because of data limitations only a few empirical studies exist on this topic from a policy point of view the understanding of interdependent retirement decisions should become important if legislators in different european countries are forced to synchronise minimum retirement ages for men and women which are lower now for females in a number of countries we study the possibility of interdependent retirement using austrian data the findings show an asymmetry husbands react to changes in wives legal minimum retirement age wives don t react vice versa the cross effect on men s participation rates resulting from a rise in women s minimum retirement age is almost half as large as the direct effect upon the women themselves

household income as a determinant of child labor and school enrollment in brazil evidence from a social security reform abstractthis article studies the effects of household income on labor participation and school enrollment of children aged 10 14 in brazil using a social security reform as a source of exogenous variation in household income i find that increased benefits are associated with increases in school enrollment for girls as well as a smaller reduction in their labor participation but i find no effects for boys i also uncover evidence that the gender of the benefit receiver matters for girls labor variables only benefits received by females reduce girls work

child labor and coordination failures abstract in this note we show that a technology based coordination failure may explain the emergence of laws restricting child labor child labor may arise because of the lack of a coordination mechanism between parental decisions to invest in the human capital of their children and firms decisions to invest in skill biased technologies legislative intervention in many cases helps coordinate expectations towards a pareto superior outcome with investments both in human capital and in skill biased technologies

child income appropriations as a disease coping mechanism consequences for the health education relationship this paper analyses the relationships between hiv aids and education taking into account the appropriative nature of child income using a theoretical model we show that considering remittances from one s child as an insurance asset can reverse the usual negative relationship between disease prevalence and educational investment this prediction confirms the results of an empirical study conducted on data compiled from the demographic and health survey dhs database for 12 sub sahara african countries for children aged between 7 and 22 years old using regional hiv prevalence as a measure of health risk we find that the sign of the slope between health risk and the enrolment of children is not constant splitting the data based on expected remittance patterns for example rural versus urban we obtain that the effect is most likely driven by household characteristics related to child income appropriation

school attendance and child labor a model of collective behavior this paper theoretically investigates how community approval or disap proval aects school attendance and child labor and how aggregate behavior of the community feeds back towards the formation and persistence of an anti or pro schooling norm the proposed community model continues to take aggregate and idiosyncratic poverty into account as an important driver of low school attendance and child labor but it provides also an explanation for why equally poor villages or regions can display dierent attitudes towards schooling distinguishing between three dierent modes of child time allocation school attendance work and leisure the paper shows how the time costs of schooling and child labor productivity con tribute to the existence of a locally stable anti schooling norm it proposes policies that eectively exploit the social dynamics and initiate a permanent escape from the anti schooling equilibrium an extension of the model explores how an education contingent subsidy paid to the poorest families of a community manages to initiate a bandwagon eect towards education for all the optimal mechanism design of

why children work attend school or stay idle the roles of ability and household wealth abstract this paper offers a theoretical and empirical analysis of child labor schooling and idleness neither work nor school with particular emphasis on the roles of child ability and household wealth in determining these decisions we show theoretically that idleness may be chosen optimally by low income households whose child is of low ability using a rich data set from the philippines we find that while other factors including mother s labor supply the presence of a family business and access to good school quality contribute to these decisions child ability and household wealth are the most important determinants of child idleness and the use of child labor an implication of our findings is that any policy aiming to reduce child labor and increase child schooling should also target improvements in child ability and cognitive development through investments in the nutrition and health of poor children

you get what you pay for schooling incentives and child labor abstract can schooling promotion deter child participation in hazardous forms of child labor we examine two interventions intended to promote schooling and deter child labor for children associated with carpet factories in kathmandu the first intervention provides scholarships for school related expenses the second provides the scholarship and an in kind stipend conditional on school attendance paying for schooling expenses promotes schooling but only at the beginning of the school year when most schooling expenses occur the scholarship combined with the conditional stipend increases school attendance rates by 11 decreases grade failure rates by 46 and reduces carpet weaving by 48 financial support lasted one year effects on schooling and weaving do not persist past the year of support you get what you pay for when schooling incentives are used to combat hazardous child labor

why have the labor force participation rates of older men increased since the mid 1990s this article seeks to explain the substantial increases in older men s labor force participation rates observed since the mid 1990s using data from the united states canada and the united kingdom i exploit the cohort effects driving recent increases in older women s participation rates to identify the effect of a wife s participation decision on her husband s participation decision i then decompose the changes in older married men s participation rates demonstrating that husbands responses to increases in wives participation in the labor force can explain one fourth one half and one third of the increase in the united states canada and the united kingdom respectively

are labels effective against child labor abstract in this paper we investigate the impact of introducing a label certifying the absence of child labor in the export production of the south when most eligible producers in the south can obtain the label its impact is considerably reduced by a displacement effect whereby adult workers replace children in the export sector while children replace adults in the domestic sector the label is then unable to create a price differential in the south between goods produced under the label and those produced without it when only a small fraction of eligible producers have access to the label the south exports both labeled and unlabeled goods to the north in this case labeled producers generally gain while those without a label generally loose from the introduction of the label ex ante welfare may fall in the south if the probability of getting a label when one qualifies is small the impact on child labor is in general ambiguous

effects of public policy on child labor current knowledge gaps and implications for program design many policy instruments can be used to address or affect child labor even if they are implemented to achieve other objectives from a theoretical point of view however the impact of these policies on child labor is undetermined this paper discusses the evidence generated by rigorous evaluations on the impact on child labor of labor market programs conditional and unconditional transfers and microcredit among other social programs and interventions the study finds that although transfer programs generally tend to reduce child labor other policies risk increasing child labor especially if they affect households productive opportunities the findings also point to knowledge gaps that should be addressed in future evaluations while progress has been made over the past decade there is still much to learn about the effects of public policy on the labor participation of many children in developing countries

decoupling economic growth from carbon emissions growth in the united states the role of research and development abstract the united states has achieved economic growth compatible with carbon reduction since 2007 this work is addressed to understand the eight effects especially effects related to research development rd whereas economic scale was the primary inhibitor to the drop of carbon emission followed by investment intensity population size and sectoral energy structure the results of decoupling efforts analysis uncover that energy intensity r d intensity r d efficiency and sectoral carbon intensity contributed to decoupling economic growth from carbon emission whereas investment intensity population size and sectoral energy structure did not contribute to the decoupling finally some policy implications are proposed

child labor urban proximity and household composition using detailed survey data from nepal this paper examines the determinants of child labor with a special emphasis on urban proximity we find that children residing in or near urban centers attend school more and work less in total but are more likely to be involved in wage work or in a small business the larger the urban center the stronger the effect is urban proximity is found to reduce the workload of children and improve school attendance up to 3 h of travel time from the city in areas of commercialized agriculture located 3 to 7 h from the city children do more farm work urban proximity effects are accounted for by a combination of local labor supply and demand conditions most notably the local importance of agriculture the education level of the parents and the local wage rate child servants which represent a small proportion of all children work much harder than other children and appear particularly at risk

inequality as a determinant of child labor abstract this paper analyzes the relationship between the phenomenon of child labor and public education under majority voting it shows that under unequal income distribution public schooling is not supported by the majority and the amount of child labor becomes enormous

the heterogeneous effects of a food price crisis on child school enrollment and labor evidence from pakistan using a panel survey this paper investigates how the increase in food prices in pakistan in 2008 2010 affected children s school enrollment and labor the causal identification relies on geographical variations in the price of food wheat the results show that the negative impacts of food price increase on school enrollment differ by gender economic status and the presence of siblings the negative effects on school do not directly correspond to the increase in child labor because the transition from being idle to labor activity or from school to being idle are significant particularly among the poor girls the results also show that children in households with access to agricultural land are not affected by higher food prices the analyses reveal a more dynamic picture of the impact of food price increase on child status and contribute to broader policy discussion to mitigate the impact of crises on children s education

perverse consequences of well intentioned regulation evidence from india s child labor ban although bans against child labor are a ubiquitous policy tool there is very little empirical evidence on 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 whom the ban applied to we show that the relative probability of child employment increases and child wages relative to adult wages decrease after the ban our main specification relies on comparing changes in work probabilities over time for children of the same age but with siblings who are rendered either eligible or ineligible for legal work when the ban is implemented the increases in the probability of economic activity are largest for children i in areas where the industries targeted by the ban play a larger role in local labor markets ii in areas where the probability of employer inspections is higher and iii in families that are poorer 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 we also find decreases in child participation in schooling for younger children only and no economically meaningful change in household outcomes like assets or calorie intake

how social security and medicare affect retirement behavior in a world of incomplete markets this paper provides an empirical analysis of how the u s social security and medicare insurance system affect the labor supply of older males in the presence of incomplete markets for loans annuities and health insurance we estimate a detailed dynamic programming dp model of the joint labor supply and social security acceptance decision focusing on a sample of males in the low to middle income brackets whose only pension is social security the dp model delivers a rich set of predictions about the dynamics of retirement behavior and comparisons of actual vs predicted behavior show that the dp model is able to account for wide variety of phenomena observed in the data including the pronounced peaks in the distribution of retirement ages at 62 and 65 the ages of early and normal eligibility for social security benefits respectively we identify a significant fraction of health insurance constrained individuals who have no form of retiree health insurance other than medicare and who can only obtain fairly priced private health insurance via their employer s group health plan the combination of significant individual risk aversion and a long tailed pareto distribution of health care expenditures implies that there is a significant security value for these individuals to remain employed until they are eligible for medicare coverage at age 65 overall our model suggests that a number of heretofore puzzling aspects of retirement behavior can be viewed as artifacts of particular details of the social security rules whose incentive effects are especially strong for lower income individuals and those who do not have access to fairly priced loans annuities and health insurance

does child labour displace schooling evidence on behavioral responses to an enrollment subsidy this brief summarizes the results of a gender impact evaluation study entitled does child labour displace schooling evidence on behavioral responses to an enrollment subsidy conducted between 1995 and 1996 in bangladesh the study observed that the subsidy increases schooling but its effect on child labour is ambiguous the subsidy increased schooling by far more than it reduced child labour substitution effects helped protect current incomes from the higher school attendance induced by the subsidy substitution effects helped protect current incomes from the higher school attendance induced by the subsidy the reduction in the incidence of child labour by boys girls represents about one quarter eighth of the increase in their school enrollment rate

how does child labor affect the demand for adult labor evidence from rural mexico do employers substitute adults for children or do they treat them as complements using data from a mexican schooling experiment i find that decreasing child farmwork is accompanied by increasing adult labor demand this increase was not caused by treatment money reaching farm employers there were no significant increases in harvest prices and quantities nonlabor inputs or nonfarm labor supply furthermore coordinated movements in price and quantity can distinguish this increase in demand from changes in supply induced by the treatment s income effects thus declining child supply caused increasing adult demand employers substituted adults for children

the role of birth order in child labour and schooling does when a child was born relative to his or her siblings affect whether the child attends school or participates in child labour we investigate this question by estimating the causal effect of birth order on the probabilities of school attendance and child labour participation to address the potential endogeneity of family size we use instrumental variable approach where the proportion of boys in the family is used to instrument family size using a longitudinal household survey data from ethiopia we estimate unobserved effects bivariate probit instrumental variable model of school attendance and child labour choices the results suggest that the probability of child labour participation decreases with birth order but we find no evidence that suggests birth order affects the probability of school attendance however among children who are going to school hours spent studying increases with birth order results from complementary time use analysis reveal that there is no birth order effect on hour

teenage school attendance and cash transfers an impact evaluation of panes proquest denotes formulae omitted three years after a severe economic crisis the uruguayan government launched a temporary antipoverty plan the national plan for social emergency assistance panes which took place from april 2005 to december 2007 lasting for thirty four months this program included a cash transfer component citizen income which was in fact the main intervention of the plan in the short run the primary objective of this intervention was to provide cash assistance to indigent households in the long run it aimed at promoting social integration in many ways such as carrying out educational and labor interventions for adults encouraging households to foster child schooling and promoting health checks to pursue this objective in the original design program participation was conditional on school enrollment for those households with children and health checks for all beneficiaries however in practice conditionalities were not controlled owing to lack of administrative coordination among the involved institutions although promoting schooling was not the main objective of the plan the cash transfer might have affected school attendance and child labor through a direct income effect and also through the influence of the announced conditionalities the provision of conditional cash transfers as a means to break the intergenerational transmission of poverty has entailed a redesign of latin american social protection systems over the past two decades the abundant literature on impact evaluations of conditional cash transfers indicates that many programs have successfully increased child schooling particularly in the age group six to thirteen and in some cases have reduced child labor with no major undesirable effects on adult labor supply eclac 2006 fiszbein and schady 2009 bouillon and tejerina 2007 saavedra and garcia 2012 yet the design and implementation of these programs varies a great deal across different instances and baseline situations also differ across countries according to the existing literature baseline enrollment rates design issues such as payments scheme and timing type of conditionalities complementary supplyside interventions and the generosity of the transfer are strongly associated with the magnitude of the effects on schooling fiszbein and schady 2009 bouillon and tejerina 2007 saavedra and garcia 2012 this paper seeks to contribute to the accumulating literature about the impacts of cash transfers on teenage schooling and labor by providing evidence from a middle income country in which the initial enrollment rates were above the average of the countries where these programs have been previously launched we analyze program effects on school attendance and child labor for children aged fourteen to seventeen this group concentrates the main problems of the uruguayan educational system as it exhibits persistently high drop out rates owing to this circumstance it is important to find out to what extent cash transfers can contribute to overcome this problem we also explore the role of some of the potential channels highlighted in the cash transfer literature household income adult labor supply and labor income and conditionalities this evaluation is based on two data sets the official administrative records from panes applicants baseline data and two waves of a follow up survey that was specifically designed to carry out the impact evaluation of the program the first gathered eighteen months after the program started and the second two months after the program ended we provide evidence using two identification strategies a regression discontinuity design rdd using separately the data from each wave of the evaluation survey and a difference in differences dd approach that exploits the longitudinal nature of the collected data the questionnaire from the first wave of the follow up survey allows us to partially explore the role of conditionalities

child labor and the interaction between the quantity and quality of children this article analyzes the impacts of child labor on the interaction between the quantity and quality of children in the spirit of becker and lewis it shows that without child labor the quantity of children can be a normal good so that it increases with parental income under some fairly standard formulations however the correlation between fertility and parental income becomes negative when the role of child labor is considered the model also implies that fertility increases with the wage rate of child labor moreover it suggests that government intervention not only directly affects the supply of child labor but also influences parents decisions on fertility which indirectly determines children s labor market participations

targeting child labor in debt bondage despite recent multilateral efforts to single out child labor in debt bondage as one of the worst forms of child labor several important questions have yet to be addressed how pervasive is the phenomenon are there systematic correlations between the incidence of children in debt bondage and the economic legislative and financial development indicators of the economy how does an understanding of these correlates affect the way national and international policy measures aimed at targeting this form of child labor are perceived this article addresses each of these questions the empirical findings suggest strong correlation between the likelihood of the incidence of child labor in debt bondage with the stage of development of an economy the stage of financial development and enforcement of core labor rights building on this evidence the article presents a theoretical model that highlights the drawbacks and merits of a number of policies aimed at putting checks on child labor in debt bondage

sri lanka can conditional cash transfer programs serve as safety nets in keeping children at school and from working when exposed to shocks this brief summarizes the results of a gender impact evaluation study can conditional cash transfer cct programs serve as safety nets in keeping children at school and from working when exposed to shocks conducted the program started in 1997 and still exists today in sri lanka the study observed that income shocks on poor households are known to induce parents to take their children out of school and send them to work when other risk coping instruments are insufficient cct programs where the condition is on school attendance have been shown to be effective in increasing educational achievements and reducing child work shocks are highly prevalent and children have irregular periods of school enrollment children who are taken out of school are less likely to re enroll