Gender and Racial Biases: Evidence from Child Adoption

Leonardo Felli, Leeat Yariv, Mariagiovanna Baccara and Allan Collard-Wexler ()

No 7647, CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers

Abstract: This paper uses a new data set on domestic child adoption to document the preferences of potential adoptive parents over born and unborn babies relinquished for adoption by their birth mothers. We show that adoptive parents exhibit significant biases in favor of girls and against African-American babies. A non-African-American baby relinquished for adoption attracts the interest of potential adoptive parents with probability 11.5% if it is a girl and 7.9% if it is a boy. As for race, a non-African-American baby has a probability of attracting the interest of an adopting parent at least seven times as high as the corresponding probability for an African-American baby. In addition, we show that a child?s desirability in the adoption process depends significantly on time to birth (increasing over the pregnancy, but decreasing after birth) and on adoption costs. We also document the attitudes toward babies? characteristics across different categories of adoptive parents - heterosexual and same-sex couples, as well as single women and foreign couples. Finally, we consider several recently discussed policies excluding same-sex and foreign couples from the adoption process. In our data, such policies would reduce the number of adopted babies by 6% and 33%, respectively.

Keywords: Child adoption; Gender bias; Matching; Racial bias; Search (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C78 J13 J15 J16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010-01
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP7647 (application/pdf)
CEPR Discussion Papers are free to download for our researchers, subscribers and members. If you fall into one of these categories but have trouble downloading our papers, please contact us at subscribers@cepr.org

Related works:
Working Paper: Gender and Racial Biases: Evidence from Child Adoption (2010)
Working Paper: Gender and Racial Biases: Evidence from Child Adoption (2010)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:7647

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP7647

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers Centre for Economic Policy Research, 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().