Risk, Network Quality, and Family Structure: Child Fostering Decisions in Burkina Faso

Richard Akresh ()

No 1471, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

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: social networks; risk-coping; child fostering; household structure (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D10 J12 O15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 45 pages
Date: 2005-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-afr
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (17)

Published - published in: Journal of Human Resources, 2009, 44(4), 976-997

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Related works:
Working Paper: Risk, Network Quality, and Family Structure: Child Fostering Decisions in Burkina Faso (2005)
Working Paper: Risk, Network Quality, and Family Structure: Child Fostering Decisions in Burkina Faso (2005)
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