School attendance and labor market participation of adolescents in Uruguay

In this paper a discussion of truancy and attendance to school in the case of youths of ages between 14! and 17 years old in Uruguay is presented. In this age range, attendance to school was above 70% along the last ten years, while labor force participation has been stable around less than 30%; in turn, 10% of youths of those ages declares both attending to school and being active in the labor market, and a similar proportion is neither active nor attends school. In this context, the determinants of the decisions on investment in schooling are analysed, and a probit model is estimated to assess the impact of a set of explanatory variables on the probability of school attendance, based on data from the Uruguayan Household Survey for 1997. Additionally, a model is estimated for the joint decision on school attendance and labour market participation. The evidence suggests that both decisions call be seen as alternative ones, and that a set of variables representing individual characteristics and familiy background of die youths exert a significant influence in each of them, the impact being of the opposite sign in each ease.