Miners and Minors: The Impact of Mineral Resource Booms on Female Underage Employment

Resource booms are often associated with adverse distributional effects across economies. We exploit temporal and spatial variation generated by the copper boom in the 2000s to measure the effect of mineral resource extraction on human capital investment in Zambia. Combining data from repeated cross-sections of households and mines, we find that adolescent girls near mines have lower school attendance and higher engagement in paid work. We argue that the main pull factor is the increase in the demand for labor among sectors where women typically dominate. As more adult women marry and married women live in households that benefit from the wealth generated by spouses, adolescent girls fill the gap previously met by adult women in the labor market. Our findings suggest that resource booms induce inequitable distributional effects across generations of women.