@techreport{Akresh2005Risk,
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.},
author = {Richard Akresh},
copyright = {http://www.econstor.eu/dspace/Nutzungsbedingungen},
keywords = {J12; O15; D10; 330; child fostering; risk-coping; social networks; household structure; Familie; Kinderbetreuung; Soziales Netzwerk; Burkina Faso},
language = {eng},
number = {1471},
title = {Risk, Network Quality, and Family Structure : Child Fostering Decisions in Burkina Faso},
type = {IZA Discussion paper series},
url = {http://hdl.handle.net/10419/20770},
year = {2005}
}
