Useful children: An economic study of child workers in the cotton textile industry, 1900-1910.

摘要

Industrial child labor in the United States is analyzed within the framework of modern labor economics using data collected between 1907 and 1910 on children working in the cotton textile industry. The data represent four northern and six southern textile states, the basis of extensive interregional comparisons made throughout the study. The central focus is on those factors which determinined the labor force experience and schooling of each working child up to age sixteen. Using ordinary least squares, estimates of the child's level of work experience and educational attainment are obtained as functions of the child's age, gender, nationality, length of father's U.S. residency, wage rate, occupation, and family per capita income. Also studied are the effects of public education expenditures and child labor and schooling legislation, and the determinants of children's earnings. The investigation demonstrates that a child's labor supply was an increasing function of the child's wage but was not significantly affected by the level of family income. It was also determined that schooling was positively correlated with family income, with public expenditure on schools, and, for some among the foreign born, with the process of assimilation into American culture.