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Risk, Network Quality, and Family Structure: Child Fostering Decisions in Burkina Faso
Richard Akresh University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) January 2005 IZA Discussion Paper No. 1471; Yale University Economic Growth Center Discussion Paper No. 902 Abstract: Researchers often assume household structure is exogenous, but child fostering, the institution in which parents send their biological children to live with another family, is widespread in sub-Saharan Africa and provides evidence against this assumption. Using data I collected in Burkina Faso, I analyze a household's decision to adjust its size and composition through fostering. A household fosters children as a risk-coping mechanism in response to exogenous income shocks, if it has a good social network, and to satisfy labor demands within the household. Increases of one standard deviation in a household's agricultural shock, percentage of good network members, or number of older girls increase the probability of sending a child above the current fostering level by 29.1, 30.0, and 34.5 percent, respectively. Testing whether factors influencing the sending decision have an opposite impact on the receiving decision leads to a rejection of the symmetric, theoretical model for child fostering.
Keywords: Child fostering, risk-coping, social networks, household structure JEL Classifications: O15, J12, D10 Working Paper SeriesDate posted: January 24, 2005 ; Last revised: January 24, 2005Suggested CitationContact Information
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