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http://hdl.handle.net/10419/20770
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| Title: | | Risk, Network Quality, and Family Structure : Child Fostering Decisions in Burkina Faso  |
| Authors: | | Akresh, Richard |
| Issue Date: | | 2005 |
| Series/Report no.: | | IZA Discussion paper series 1471 |
| 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. |
| Subjects: | | child fostering risk-coping social networks household structure |
| JEL: | | J12 O15 D10 |
| Document Type: | | Working Paper |
| Appears in Collections: | | IZA Discussion Papers, Forschungsinstitut zur Zukunft der Arbeit (IZA)
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