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This paper evaluates the short-term impact of childcare centres' closures, due to COVID-19 restrictions, on Brazilian mothers' labour force participation and employment rates.

Formal education is non-mandatory according to Brazilian law until the age of four, allowing the identification of children that attend childcare centres and of those that do not attend. Using data from the Brazilian Household Survey, PNAD Contínua/IBGE, the authors construct a two-period panel with women sampled in the second quarter of 2019 and 2020. The authors apply propensity score matching and differences-in-differences methods to control selection into treatment.

The results show a negative impact in terms of employment for mothers whose children attended a childcare centre before the COVID-19 pandemic. But there was no impact in terms of labour force participation rates. Investigating heterogeneous effects associated with childcare centres' closures, the authors find that women with fewer years of schooling, with children aged two or three years old and located in urban areas, suffered greater penalties in the labour market due to the closure of childcare centres.

Few studies could distinguish the pandemic effects directly associated with childcare centres' closures. The paper is the first to analyse the Brazilian case, undertaking an original approach to handle the problem of selection bias. The results help identify the most vulnerable groups of women in the labour market, shedding light on the importance of childcare centres on women's labour supply and of compensating mechanisms to serve as protection during the crisis.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/IJSE-11-2022-0748.

The purpose of this paper is to examine if child labour can have long-term consequences on children’s health status.

To capture this relationship, this paper uses the Brazilian National Household Survey (PNAD) conducted in 1998, 2003 and 2008, structured as a pseudo panel and estimated using a fractional response model.

The results show that child labour is negatively associated with child’s health status, and the longer the hours worked, the worse is the child’s health status. The authors also observe that hazardous labour had a three times higher negative effect on the child’s health and those who worked in service sectors are more prone to having a worse health status.

The study shows that different children’s occupations may have very different impacts on children’s health and indicates that despite the fact that Brazil has a strict law prohibiting child labour, the share of children working is still high and this work has a negative impact on child’s health.

The purpose of this paper is to present evidences on the spillover effects of a cash transfer addressed to poor elders in Brazil.

Using the Brazilian National Households Survey (PNAD) the authors assess the effects of an income transfer to the elders on household composition and the labor supply of elders and co-residing relatives, under a regression discontinuity design.

The authors do not find strong evidences of changes in the household composition due to the program. However the authors found reductions in the elders’ labor force participation, indicating that the program allow elders to retire. Moreover, the transfer yields a decrease in the labor force participation of co-residents, depending on their age. The authors also observe decreases in child labor.

Along with the cash comes context-dependent effects, showing there are many latent aspects of these transfers yet to be uncovered.