Impact of Child Labour on School Attendance and School Attainment: Evidence from Bangladesh

The paper examines the linkages between child work and both school attendance and school attainment of children aged 5–17 years using data from a survey based in rural Bangladesh. This paper first looks at school attendance as an indicator of a child’s time input in schooling; then it measures the “schooling-for-age” as a learning achievement or schooling outcome. The results from the logistic regressions show that school attendance and grade attainment are lower for children who are working. The gender-disaggregated estimates show that probability of grade attainment is lower for girls than that of boys. Household permanent income, parental education and supply side correlates of schooling (presence of a primary (grade 1-6) school and secondary (grade 6-10) school in the village) are appeared to be significant determinants of schooling in rural Bangladesh. The results of this study further show that the effect of household permanent income, parental education and presence of secondary school is higher for grade attainment than school attendance.Schooling, Child Labour, Logit, Bangladesh

Divorce in cooperatively breeding long-tailed tits: a consequence of inbreeding avoidance?

The decision of whether to divorce a breeding partner between reproductive attempts can significantly affect individual fitness. In this paper, we report that 63% of surviving pairs of long-tailed tits Aegithalos caudatus divorced between years. We examine three likely explanations for the high divorce rate in this cooperative breeder. The 'better option' hypothesis predicts that divorce and re-pairing increases an individual's reproductive success. However, divorcees did not secure better partners or more helpers and there was no improvement in their reproductive success following divorce. The 'inbreeding avoidance' hypothesis predicts that females should disperse from their family group to avoid breeding with philopatric sons. The observed pattern of divorce was consistent with this hypothesis because, in contrast to the usual avian pattern, divorce was typical for successful pairs (81%) and less frequent in unsuccessful pairs (36-43%). The 'forced divorce' hypothesis predicts that divorce increases as the number of competitors increases. The pattern of divorce among failed breeders was consistent with this hypothesis, but it fails to explain the overall occurrence of divorce because divorcees rarely re-paired with their partners' closest competitors. We discuss long-tailed tits' unique association between divorce and reproductive success in the context of dispersal strategies for inbreeding avoidance