In addition to measuring short-run welfare improvements in schooling, I can also evaluate the
long-run impacts of a fostering experience. I find a strong positive correlation between current
wealth (measured as current assets or income) and the survey respondent having been fostered as
a child, even after controlling for observable characteristics of the respondent and the respondent’s
biological parents. Stronger evidence of a positive long-run return to fostering is provided by house-
hold fixed effects regressions comparing brothers and sisters from the same family and controlling
for unobservable factors that might be correlated with fostering and current wealth. Those sib-
lings, from a given family, that were fostered as children are more likely to be educated and have
occupations with higher earnings such as a businessman, government employee, or teacher and are
less likely to be a farmer and live in a rural village. These results are important for understanding
why a household adjusts its structure and the long and short-run implications of that decision.
The remainder of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2 describes the empirical setting for
the data collection. In Section 3, I describe the empirical identification strategy. Section 4 presents
the empirical results and Section 5 concludes.
2 Data and Empirical Setting
2.1 Empirical Setting
The data were collected in Bazega province in central Burkina Faso, located approximately fifty
miles from the capital, Ouagadougou.5 Households in this region consist predominantly of subsis-
tence farmers growing millet, sorghum, and groundnuts and have an average annual income of $183
(based on an average foreign exchange rate from 1998 to 2000 of $1 = 641 FCFA). On average,
conclusions from this paper may not generalize to the case of orphaned children.
5More detailed information about the fieldwork, including the survey instruments, field enumerator training man-
uals, and project reports can be found on the website: https://netfiles.uiuc.edu/akresh/www