Child Labor and the Interaction Between the Quantity and Quality of Children‪.‬

1. Introduction Motivated by substantial empirical evidence on the negative correlation between fertility rate and income, Becker and Lewis (1973) formulated the idea that parents obtain utility from both the quality and the quantity of their children. Depending on the elasticity of substitution between quantity and quality of children in parents' utility function, this framework yields the important theoretical implication that individuals may spend more on the quality improvement rather than on the increase of the quantity of their children as their incomes rise. (1) In fact, the Becker-Lewis model has become a pillar of population and family economics.