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Discussion Paper Details

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Title: How children?s schooling and work is affected when their father leaves permanently: Evidence from Colombia

Author(s): Emla Fitzsimons and Alice Mesnard

Publication Date: March 2012

Keyword(s): child labour, conditional cash transfer, credit and insurance market failures, income loss, permanent departure, safety net and schooling

Programme Area(s): Development Economics

Abstract: This paper investigates how the permanent departure of the father from the household affects children?s school enrolment and work participation in rural Colombia. Our results show that departure of the father decreases children?s school enrolment by around 4 percentage points, and increases child labour by 3 percentage points. After using household fixed effects to deal with time-invariant unobserved heterogeneity, and providing evidence suggesting strongly that estimates are not biased by time varying unobserved heterogeneity, we also exploit an interesting feature of our setting, a conditional cash transfer programme in place, and show that it counteracts the adverse effects. This, and other pieces of evidence we give, strongly suggests that the channel through which departure affects children is through reducing income. It also highlights the important safety net role played by such welfare programmes, in particular for very disadvantaged households, who are unlikely to find formal or informal ways of insuring themselves against such vagaries.

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Bibliographic Reference

Fitzsimons, E and Mesnard, A. 2012. 'How children?s schooling and work is affected when their father leaves permanently: Evidence from Colombia'. London, Centre for Economic Policy Research. https://cepr.org/active/publications/discussion_papers/dp.php?dpno=8886