Parental Sibling Sex Composition and The Impact of Kinship Foster Care on Child Outcomes

Abstract:

The effect of kinship foster care relative to other foster care is debated, and nonrandom allocation of children to the two types of care constitutes a major challenge for establishing causal evidence. This paper proposes a new instrument, the sex composition of the parents’ siblings, to address the endogeneity of kinship placement decisions. Specifically, we exploit the exogenous variation in the likelihood of kinship foster care resulting from having more aunts than uncles given the number of uncles and aunts. We find that more aunts increase the probability of placement with relatives. Aunts on the mother side are more important than aunts on the father side and girls are more likely to be placed with kin due to a higher share of aunts than are boys. Our findings primarily focus on the first-stage relationship between ma- ternal sibling sex composition and kinship foster care placement. Second-stage effects on child outcomes are limited by limited statistical power, but provide information on the mechanics of kinship placement and provides a framework for future research on the causal impacts of kinship care.