@TechReport{iza:izadps:dp1471,
            	author={Akresh, Richard},
            	title={Risk, Network Quality, and Family Structure: Child Fostering Decisions in Burkina Faso},
            	year={2005},
	month={Jan},
            	institution={Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)},
            	address={Bonn},
            	type={IZA Discussion Paper},
            	number={1471},
            	url={https://www.iza.org/publications/dp1471},
	abstract={Researchers often assume household structure is exogenous, but child fostering, the institution in which parents send their biological children to live with another family, is widespread in sub-Saharan Africa and provides evidence against this assumption. Using data I collected in Burkina Faso, I analyze a household's decision to adjust its size and composition through fostering. A household fosters children as a risk-coping mechanism in response to exogenous income shocks, if it has a good social network, and to satisfy labor demands within the household. Increases of one standard deviation in a household's agricultural shock, percentage of good network members, or number of older girls increase the probability of sending a child above the current fostering level by 29.1, 30.0, and 34.5 percent, respectively. Testing whether factors influencing the sending decision have an opposite impact on the receiving decision leads to a rejection of the symmetric, theoretical model for child fostering.},
	keywords={social networks;risk-coping;child fostering;household structure},
            }