Adjusting Household Structure: School Enrollment Impacts of Child Fostering in Burkina Faso

نویسندگان

  • Richard Akresh
  • Michael Boozer
  • Kevin Hallock
  • Ilana Redstone
  • Paul Schultz
  • Tavneet Suri
  • Christopher Udry
چکیده

Researchers claim that children growing up away from their biological parents may be at a disadvantage and have lower human capital investment. This paper measures the impact of child fostering on school enrollment and uses household and child fixed effects regressions to address the endogeneity of fostering. Data collection by the author involved tracking and interviewing the sending and receiving household participating in each fostering exchange, allowing a comparison of foster children with their non-fostered biological siblings. Foster children are equally likely as their host siblings to be enrolled after fostering and are 3.6 percent more likely to be enrolled than their biological siblings. Relative to children from non-fostering households, host siblings, biological siblings, and foster children all experience increased enrollment after the fostering exchange, indicating fostering may help insulate poor households from adverse shocks. This Pareto improvement in schooling translates into a long-run improvement in educational and occupational attainment.

برای دانلود رایگان متن کامل این مقاله و بیش از 32 میلیون مقاله دیگر ابتدا ثبت نام کنید

ثبت نام

اگر عضو سایت هستید لطفا وارد حساب کاربری خود شوید

منابع مشابه

Risk, Network Quality, and Family Structure: Child Fostering Decisions in Burkina Faso

Child fostering, the practice of parents sending their own biological children to live with another family or receiving in a child from a di®erent household, is prevalent throughout sub-Saharan Africa. There is an ongoing debate in academic research about the welfare implications due to child fostering, but prior to measuring these welfare impacts, it is critical to ̄rst understand why a family...

متن کامل

Sibling Rivalry, Residiential Rivalry, and Constraints on the Availability of Child Labor

Sibling rivalry occurs when siblings compete for parental investments. We examine how rivalry among biological siblings, who may not be co-resident, differs from rivalry among co-resident children and how this affects school enrollment for children in Burkina Faso. We test the hypothesis that the value of child labor in home production contributes to rivalry by comparing households that differ ...

متن کامل

Flexibility of Household Structure Child Fostering Decisions in Burkina Faso

Using data I collected in Africa, this paper examines a household’s decision to adjust its size through child fostering, an institution where biological parents temporarily send children to live with other families. Households experiencing negative idiosyncratic income shocks, child gender imbalances, located further from primary schools, or with more ‘‘good’’ quality network members (fewer sub...

متن کامل

Child Ability and Household Human Capital Investment Decisions in Burkina Faso

Using unique data collected by the authors in rural Burkina Faso, we examine how children’s cognitive ability influences a resource constrained household’s decision to invest in their education. We use a direct measure of child ability for all primary school-aged children, regardless of current school enrollment. We explicitly incorporate direct measures of the ability of each child’s siblings ...

متن کامل

Effective Factors on Acute Malnutrition in Children Aged 6 to 59 Months in the Centre-West Region of Burkina Faso

Background: In Burkina Faso, malnutrition is a public health problem. Despite the significant drop in the prevalence of malnutrition since 2009 according to the Directorate of Nutrition, malnutrition is still a major concern with regard to its consequences. The objective of this study was to determine the factors associated with acute malnutrition in children aged 6 to 59 months in the Sabou He...

متن کامل

ذخیره در منابع من


  با ذخیره ی این منبع در منابع من، دسترسی به آن را برای استفاده های بعدی آسان تر کنید

عنوان ژورنال:

دوره   شماره 

صفحات  -

تاریخ انتشار 2004