Child Work and Academic Achievement: Evidence from Young Lives in Ethiopia

This thesis uses Young Lives data and was submitted in part fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of DPhil in Economics for Development, University of Minnesota. The author's introduction reads:

Returns on human capital investments can take time to realize, so most human capital investments are made in the first stages of life. Schooling is crucial for human capital formation, and it is a human capital investment which mainly happens during childhood. As children grow, additional activities, such as work, start to gain importance in children’s time allocation decisions. Spending a considerable amount of time doing such activities that are not related to schooling might have effects on children’s learning processes (both negative or positive), with potential effects on their human capital accumulation. This paper studies the effect of child work on academic achievement in the context of Ethiopia.