Foster care provides substitute living arrangements to protect maltreated children. The practice is remarkably common: it is estimated that 5 percent of children in the United States are placed in foster care at some point during childhood. These children exhibit poor outcomes as children and...

Foster care placement is strongly associated with crime--for example, close to one fifth of the prison population in the United States is comprised of former foster children--yet there is little evidence on whether this relationship is causal. Leveraging the quasi-random assignment of child...

This paper reports new evidence that giving financial rewards for adopting a child from foster care or becoming a kin guardian improves the later school performance of these children. It uses linked administrative data to examine a policy change in Minnesota. This change increased the payments...

Studies of racial discrimination often condition on endogenous measures of race or on earlier decisions that might themselves be affected by discrimination. We develop quasi-experimental tools for estimating the impact of racial misclassification on measures of unwarranted disparity, and for...

Black children in the U.S. are twice as likely as white children to spend time in foster care. Such racial disparities raise concerns of discrimination, but might also reflect differences in the underlying need for intervention. This paper estimates unwarranted disparities (UDs)--racial...

Children spend years in foster care, and there are concerns that bureaucratic hurdles contribute to unnecessarily long stays. In a novel approach to policy making, the Chilean government randomized the introduction of a program aimed at reducing these delays in order to evaluate its effects on...

Ten percent of Black children in the U.S. spend time in foster care--twice the rate of white children. We estimate unwarranted disparities in foster care placement decisions, adjusting for differences in the potential for future maltreatment by leveraging the quasi-random assignment of cases to...