This paper examines the adverse effect of natural resources scarcity on children's schooling and the possible gender bias of resource collection work against girls' schooling. It uses cross-sectional data on 316 children aged 7–18 years collected from 120 rural households in Tigray, northern Ethiopia. The two-stage conditional maximum likelihood estimation technique is employed to take care of endogeneity between schooling and collection intensity decisions.

Previous studies in Ethiopia treat child labour and schooling in a broader sense without much attention to the kind of labor they are engaged in. This paper distinctively examines the adverse effect of natural resources scarcity on children’s schooling and the possible gender bias against girls’ schooling due to resource collection work

Studies have shown differences in cooperative behavior across countries and in the use of (and reaction to) a norm enforcement mechanism in cross-cultural studies.

The authors present data that prove that stark differences in both dimensions can exist even within the same town. They created a unique data set, based on one-shot public goods experiments in South Africa. Most of the group differences can be explained by variables for social capital and social environment, such as trust or household violence.