fostering only has a short-run impact or if the effects are long-lasting and translate into other social
welfare gains for the fostered individual. In addition to the tracking component in the fieldwork, a
unique aspect of the data is that they contain information about the childhood fostering experience
for every current adult head of household who was interviewed. Results in Table 9 indicate a strong
positive correlation between current wealth and the survey respondent having been fostered as a
child.15 Results in columns 1 and 4 show that respondents who were fostered as children have 40.1
percent higher asset levels and 54.3 percent higher income levels (calculated after converting log
points into percentage increases).
I do not claim that fostering causes higher wealth because there could be other factors that
influence the respondent’s wealth such as gender, education, and family background. In columns
2 and 5, I estimate ordinary least squares regressions to measure the impact of being fostered as
a child on current wealth, controlling for observable factors that might influence current wealth
including whether the respondent’s father or mother held a position of responsibility in the village,
the number of the father’s wives, the respondent’s marital status, age, occupation, education and
gender. The point estimate on the fostering variable is reduced slightly compared with columns
1 and 4, but there is still a positive, significant correlation between being fostered as a child and
higher current wealth levels.
Columns 3 and 6 measure the impact of being fostered as a child for various durations and show
that children who spent less than 5 years living away from their biological parents have higher
levels of current wealth compared with non-fostered children (71.9 percent higher in assets and
59.7 percent higher in income). For those children who lived away from their biological parents for
a longer time period, the positive correlation with current wealth diminishes. This is consistent
15I use two measures of current wealth, the average value of all assets owned between 1998 and 2000 and the
average level of income over the same time period. Assets include seventeen different items that rural households
might typically own, such as a bicycle, a radio, a wheelbarrow and a cart. To account for heterogeneity in asset
quality across individuals, the value of each asset as reported by the respondent is used to measure total asset value.
21