Sweeping It under the Rug: Household Chores and Misreporting of Child Labor

We collect data on child labor in almost 3,000 Nepali households, and our analysis shows that estimates of child labor prevalence vary from 11.6% to 29% with the definition of child labor used. The variation comes from the number of hours worked and from which tasks are considered child labor. Furthermore, we use two different surveys during data collection. In the first, an adult (proxy) reports on the daily activities of each child in the household, and in the second, the children (direct) respond themselves. Proxy and direct responses are less likely to match when the definition includes time spent on household chores, which is typically underestimated for girls. We find that proxy reporting of whether the child worked in the past week is 5.5 percentage points lower than the direct reporting. Within households, misreporting is significantly more likely for girls than for boys. Across households, however, misreporting is associated with child's age, not gender. Furthermore, among girls misreporting is associated with the number of younger children at home. Our analysis helps explain why varying measures of child labor used in the literature yield different results.