Risk, Network Quality, and Family Structure: Child Fostering Decisions in Burkina Faso
| dc.creator | Akresh, Richard | |
| dc.date | 2017-04-01T19:32:27Z | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2026-07-09T04:01:24Z | |
| dc.description | 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. | |
| dc.identifier | doi:10.22004/ag.econ.28454 | |
| dc.identifier | https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/28454/files/dp050902.pdf | |
| dc.identifier | http://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/28454 | |
| dc.identifier.uri | http://hdl.handle.net/123456789/543628 | |
| dc.language | eng | |
| dc.publisher | ||
| dc.source | http://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/28454 | |
| dc.title | Risk, Network Quality, and Family Structure: Child Fostering Decisions in Burkina Faso | |
| dc.type | Text |