School Enrollment Impacts of Non-traditional Household Structure

Children growing up away from their biological parents may experience lower human capital investment. This paper measures the impact of child fostering on school enrollment using …xed e¤ects 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. Young foster children are 17.5 and 17.9 percent more likely to be enrolled after fostering than their host and biological siblings, respectively. This schooling improvement translates into a long-run improvement in educational and occupational attainment. Keywords: Human Capital Investment, Household Structure, Child Fostering JEL classi…cation code: J12, I20, O15, D10 I thank Michael Boozer, Kevin Hallock, Darren Lubotsky, Ilana Redstone Akresh, Paul Schultz, Tavneet Suri, Christopher Udry, and seminar participants at the BREAD, NEUDC and Minnesota International Development conferences and at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, Michigan State University, University of Michigan, University of Montreal, and Yale University for helpful comments and suggestions. I acknowledge the collaboration between Yale University and l’Unité d’Enseignement et de Recherche en Démographie of the University of Ouagadougou that aided the data collection. I thank the following organizations for …nancial support: National Science Foundation (Grant 0082840), Social Science Research Council, J. William Fulbright Fellowship, National Security Education Program, Institute for the Study of World Politics, and Yale Center for International and Area Studies. Finally, I thank the members of the …eld research team, in particular the …eld supervisor, Ouedraogo Touende Bertrand, and the data entry supervisor, Hubert Barka Traore. Contact Information: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Department of Economics, 504 E. Armory Avenue, Champaign, IL 61820. Email: [email protected] “The committee recommends that [Burkina Faso] urgently take all measures necessary in order to put a stop to the practice of ‘fostering’and traditional adoption.” [United Nations, Committee on the Rights of the Child, 2002] “The majority of these [foster and informally adopted] children, mostly girls, are made to work around the clock. They have little or no time to play or interact with other children. They are denied education and are subjected to hunger, even though in most cases, they prepare the meals. These children, who are abused, su¤er emotional and psychological trauma. Statistics are di¢ cult to come by because of the informal nature of these activities, but it is evident that many children now …nd themselves in employment more than ever.”[Ghanaian journalist, News From Africa-Ghana, 2003]