A Theory of the Emergence of Compulsory Education Laws

This paper explores the dynamics of voting over mandatory education when parents allocate children's time between school and labor. When poverty keeps a sufficiently high number of children at work rather than in school, the availability of forms of child labor that provide skill-enhancimg learning-by-doing cam be essential for compulsory education laws to emerge in a steady state. In poor countries where poor children are involved in th forms of child labor that provide too little or no learning-by-doing, such laws may fail to win political support thereby causing the economy to fall into a poverty trap. This paper therefore support the view that certain forms of child labor, particularly the most harmful ones should be banned, to allow poor family children to enter only those forms of child labor that provide learning-by-doing.