network quality, and family structure: child fostering decisions

Child fostering, the practice of parents sending their own biological children to live with another family, is prevalent throughout sub-Saharan Africa. Given its prevalence and the potential welfare implications for these children living away from their biological parents, this paper attempts to understand why a family decides to foster children using a unique dataset collected by the author during eighteen months of fieldwork in Burkina Faso. This paper presents a theoretical framework, in which children are efficiently allocated across households in a social network, to motivate three principal factors influencing the household decision to foster a child. A household fosters children as a risk-coping mechanism in response to exogenous income shocks, if it has a better quality social network, and to satisfy labor demands within the household. Empirical evaluation of these three covariates finds that they significantly influence the household decision to send a child, but not the decision to receive a child. Increases of one standard deviation in a household's shock, percentage of goo