From Loans to Labor: Access to Credit, Entrepreneurship, and Child Labor

This paper seeks to understand household business decisions in response to increased credit access in an environment with multiple market failures. A simple model suggests that households at certain wealth thresholds might be able to overcome the fixed costs of entering entrepreneurship when they have increased access to credit. In the presence of labor market imperfections however, these same households may also be more likely to employ child labor. I test these predictions using household- and child-level panel data from Thailand. To isolate the causal impacts of household borrowing, I exploit the exogenous timing and institutional features of the Million Baht Program, one of the largest government initiatives to increase household access to credit in the world. I find that, consistent with the model, expanded access to credit raises entry into entrepreneurship for households in specific wealth groups while simultaneously increasing the use of child labor in these households. The results suggest that through the avenue of encouraging entrepreneurial activity, expanding credit access may have unintended consequences for the supply of child labor.