project: Final The Dynamics of School and Work in Rural Bangladesh
The objective of this project is to investigate the eect of work on the school progress of rural Bangladeshi children. BACKGROUND: Although labor force participation rates for school-age children (i.e. aged 5-14) in developing countries have been declining over time, recent International Labor Organization estimates (1996) show that child labor continues to be a very pervasive problem that is generally associated with low levels of educational attainment. Bangladesh is a typical example of this pattern, particularly in rural areas. Recent estimates indicate that among children aged 15-19, 27.5 percent have never attended school. Among those who attended school, 36 percent started school later than 6 years of age (the ocial school entry age), 69.2 percent had reached secondary school, and less than 20 percent had completed secondary school. Furthermore, estimates based on the Child Labor Survey 1995-96 (Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics, 1996) indicate that 19 percent of children aged 5-14 are in the labor force, and child labor constitutes about 12 percent of the total labor force of Bangladesh. DATA: The data for the analysis come from the 1996 Matlab Health and Socio-Economic Survey (MHSS), which covered 141 villages of Matlab, a region of rural Bangladesh. The MHSS collected extensive current and retrospective information on multiple domains from approx0
imately 38,000 individuals in a sample of over 7000 households, and conducted a detailed community survey. The present analysis focuses on the school and work experiences, up to the end of secondary school, of individuals who were aged 15-25 at the time of the survey. We are mainly interested in the eect of work on the acquisition of basic skills needed in the labor market and in life, skills that are provided by basic education which is, in turn, by delivered primary and secondary education. Thus, we will focus our attention on the sequence of school and work outcomes up to the end of secondary school. A child starting school at the ocial age of 6 will, in the absence of school delay, complete secondary school by age 15, the beginning of adulthood in Bangladesh. TASKS: First of all, it is important that you have a good understanding of the information available in the data. Thus, you need to read the codebook carefully. 1.- Construct descriptive statistics of the main variables of interest: nosch, agesch, agew, edu, attepri, attesec, compsec. Also construct descriptive statistics of the same variables conditional on gender and working status (work variable). Describe your ndings. 2.- Construct linear and loglinear regressions of the variable edu as a function of individual and environmental characteristics, without including work. Justify your choice of explanatory variables. Discuss your ndings (signicance, R2; :::). 3.- Dene dummy variables for: started to work before school entry (worke), started to work while in primary school (workp) and started to work ...