Bargaining over Sons and Daughters: Child Labor, School Attendance and Intra-Household Gender Bias in Brazil

Abstract

This paper we examine intra-household gender differences and the incidence of child labor and children’s school attendance in Brazil to test whether the unitary model of household allocations is suitable in the child labor context. We begin by building an intra-household allocation model where fathers and mothers may affect the education investment and the child labor participation of their sons and daughters differently due to differences in the children's human capital technologies and/or differences in parental preferences. Using the 1996 Brazilian Household Survey, we estimate the impact of a parent’s education, non-labor income and child labor experience on the labor market status and school attendance of their sons and daughters separately. We find that, for children’s labor status, the father’s education, non-labor income and the age at which he first began working in the labor market has a greater impact on the labor status of sons than of daughters, while the opposite is true for mother’s education, non-labor income and the age at which she first began working in the labor market, which have a greater impact on the labor status of daughters than of sons. In addition, when it comes to schooling decisions, both fathers and mothers