Full Citation

Title: Fostering Children

Citation Type: Miscellaneous

Publication Year: 2019

ISBN:

ISSN:

DOI:

NSFID:

PMCID:

PMID:

Abstract: Foster families constitute a crucial input into foster care services. In this paper, a household choice model is built to examine why households choose to be foster parents. The model is motivated by the inability of classical altruism models to explain important facts about foster families and children. In the model, children are costly and foster families get value from taking care of foster children through the human capital of the foster child. The model links a household's decision to foster to their own fertility and wage and makes predictions about which households have the highest willingness to foster based on these factors. The model's predictions find strong support in the data through instrumental variable strategies and the model is able to rationalize many of the motivating facts. A simple form of the model is jointly estimated to more directly compare and quantify the mechanisms. Sending the price of biological children to infinity induces four times more foster families while sending the time cost of foster children to 0 induces 50% more families families. The model and data suggest that foster children are not perfect substitutes for biological children. Alternative theories are discussed in the context of the data and empirical results.

Url: https://cameronntaylor.github.io/pdfs/foster.pdf

User Submitted?: No

Authors: Taylor, Cameron

Publisher: Stanford Graduate School of Business

Data Collections: IPUMS USA

Topics: Housing and Segregation, Other

Countries: