| The economic effects of the HIV/AIDS pandemic in Kenya have placed new challenges on Kenyan households, as the rate at which children are being displaced continues to grow. Traditionally, extended families acted as social safety nets to care for these children, but as the pandemic continues to ravage Kenya families' resources are becoming overwhelmed. Although reliable estimates are unavailable, one practice that has become common is the fostering of unrelated children. This study analyzes how household child labor supply in Kenya is affected by intra-household relationships.; In households where resources are restricted, it is unlikely that adults are equally altruistic toward their own children, children of their relatives, and unrelated children. With the limited availability of credit markets, possible sources of income would come from employing children in the home, thereby freeing up the time of the adults currently working in the home and/or from sending the children to work. The premise of this paper is that economically constrained households foster children, as long as the benefits of doing so outweigh the costs (Becker, 1976).; This study enhances the theoretical modeling of child labor outcomes by adding relationship of the child to the head of the household into Brown, Deardorff, and Stern's (2001) backward-bending labor supply model as well as introducing market production into Balestrino's (1997) three-period non-altruistic overlapping-generations stationary model. Creating the distinctions between household and labor market work and between part-time and full-time work add to the empirical modeling (based on Maitra and Ray (2002)) of child labor outcomes.; This study finds that a child's age, gender, and relationship to the head all affect the child labor outcome. The child's relationship to the head of the household is a large determinant of the child's time allocation. The research supports the premise that a child who is unrelated to the head of the household is more likely to be allocated labor market work than a related child. It is the argument of this study that child labor policy must be based in part on the characteristics of the individual child in the household. |
