The Distribution of a Federal Entitlement: The Case of Adoption Assistance

Adoption assistance entitlements support the adoptions of children whose birth parents’ rights have been severed after abuse or neglect. The subsidies are meant to offset the extra cost to adoptive families of raising children whose adverse experiences have left them with special physical, emotional, or behavioral needs. Previous studies of adoption assistance are limited in scope; I use administrative data on all recorded adoptions from foster care from 1996 through 2003 to examine the distribution of adoption assistance across and within states. The state-tostate variation payments is large, even after controlling for differences in the cost of living. Moreover, although adoption assistance is an entitlement for children, payments made within many states are systematically correlated with the characteristics of adoptive families. There is substantial evidence that the state administration of this federal entitlement leads to unequal treatment of similar children.Adoption, adoption assistance, special needs, single parents, foster parents

Using Private Contracts to Create Adoptions from Foster Care

Creating adoptions for children waiting in foster care is a good investment, but the number of adoptions created each year meets only a fraction of the need. This paper explores how the organization of the delivery of social services to waiting children and prospective adoptive families influences adoption creation. Cross-section time-series estimates are supplemented with a new augmented fixed effects procedure to demonstrate that the use of contracts with private agencies bolsters adoption creation. Contracts for recruitment and orientation of prospective adoptive parents are particularly effective.adoption, child welfare, fixed effects vector decomposition, foster care, privatization

Legal Rules and Bankruptcy Rates: Historical Evidence from the States

Since the early twentieth century, observers have attributed the wide variation in state bankruptcy rates to variation in state legal rules such as garnishment and bankruptcy exemptions. Recent econometric analyses, however, conclude that legal rules do not matter. We explore the impact of legal rules on bankruptcy rates using a new technique—fixed effects vector decomposition—to exploit historical variation in legal rules. The technique allows us to estimate the impact of timeinvariant legal rules in a fixed effects framework. We find that the variation in state legal rules explains much of the variation in state wage earner bankruptcy rates for 1926 to 1932.Bankruptcy, fixed effects vector decomposition, law and economics

Tradeoffs in Formulating a Consistent National Policy on Adoption

Just as the courts must consider the tradeoff between the best interest of the child and parental rights in involuntary termination of parental rights, policy on international adoption must consider the tradeoffs between the best interest of the child and the long-term interests of the nation. We argue that countries that suspend international adoptions do not maximize social welfare. A consistent national policy to maximize the well-being of the children and society at large would be to devote resources today to the oversight of international adoption in accord with child protections under the Hague Convention, while at the same time developing a domestic system of care that provides for the physical and developmental needs of orphaned children in the context of permanent families.adoption, international adoption, rights of the child, social welfare, termination of parental right

The Evolution of Garnishment and Wage Assignment Law in Illinois

Recent research shows that, despite high interest rates, wage earners in the early twentieth century frequently obtained credit from retail shops, from loan sharks, and from the emerging formal consumer credit market. When wage earners defaulted, the options for collection available to their creditors were governed by state laws on garnishment and wage assignment. These important laws varied widely from state to state, and little is known about their origins or evolution. In Illinois, the law put significant restrictions on creditors in the late nineteenth century, but the restrictions were removed in the first quarter of the twentieth century. This article shows how this dramatic shift resulted from the interaction of legislative and judicial activity and was driven by both interest group politics and judicial action

New Evidence on Race Discrimination Under Separate But Equal

Recently uncovered data on teachers’ salaries in Virginia in 1906 allow for more precise and consistent estimations of marginal returns to certification and formal education than had been available in previous studies. Virginia\u27s “separate but equal” educational system paid black teachers in rural counties lower wages than it paid white teachers and on average paid a lower premium to blacks for certification and formal education than it paid to whites. In incorporated cities, returns to certification and normal school education were about the same for black teachers and white teachers, although average salaries were lower for black teachers

Women’s access to credit increases women in bankruptcy: Evidence from Maryland since 1940

Little is known about women’s use of consumer bankruptcy in the US before 1980. We use new data from Maryland to show that women who petitioned for bankruptcy without a spouse were twice as common in the 1970s as they were in the 1950s and 1960s. We explore the extent to which the growing supply of credit to women explains their growing representation in bankruptcy. To do this, we examine the effect of a 1974 federal law that barred sex discrimination in lending, increasing the supply of credit to women relative to men. After the law, the probability that a bankrupt was a woman was 30 percentage points higher. Additionally, while the number of creditors reported by women filers grew to match men’s, the amount of debt female filers owed did not grow relative to male filers. Together these results imply that the law increased the supply of credit to women on the extensive margin, that is, it increased the number of women who received credit. The patterns suggest that earlier low rates of bankruptcy among women were largely a result of the low supply of credit to them

Transracial Adoption of Black Children: An Economic Analysis

The anti-discrimination law governing placement of children in foster care and adoption was intended to speed the adoption of Black children who could not be reunited with their families of origin. Only recently have two states been fined for violating this decade-old law. Based on our analysis of administrative data collected by the Children’s Bureau of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, we conclude that more vigorous enforcement of the anti-discrimination law in adoption could result in significant gains to Black children. We find that Black children spend more time as legal orphans than children of other races and that transracial placement speeds their adoptions

Tradeoffs in Formulating a Consistent National Policy on Adoption

Just as the courts must consider the tradeoff between the best interest of the child and parental rights in involuntary termination of parental rights, policy on international adoption must consider the tradeoffs between the best interest of the child and the long-term interests of the nation. We argue that countries that suspend international adoptions do not maximize social welfare. A consistent national policy to maximize the well-being of the children and society at large would be to devote resources today to the oversight of international adoption in accord with child protections under the Hague Convention, while at the same time developing a domestic system of care that provides for the physical and developmental needs of orphaned children in the context of permanent families

Eliminating Barriers to the Adoption of Children from Foster Care

For children in foster care who cannot be reunified with their families of origin, there is no question that adoption is preferable to “aging out”. Moreover, every dollar spent on adoption for a child from foster care yields three dollars in benefits. Yet, 27,854 youth aged out of foster care in FY2010, and, for each child who was adopted during the year, two children with a goal of adoption continued to wait in foster care. Research shows that there are more than enough families interested in adopting children from foster care, but that only one in 28 people who contacts a child welfare agency actually adopts a child. Today there are more than 100,000 children waiting in foster care in large part because of barriers in the adoption system that could be eliminated through changes in policy and practice. Barriers to adoption from foster care identified by participants in the Executive Session include: • financial disincentives for creating interstate adoptions; • lack of standardized information about families seeking to adopt and about children waiting to be adopted; • insufficient post-adoption support compared to support for youth aging out; and • absence of a robust model for creating adoptions, including effective recruitment of adoptive families; appropriate caseloads, training, and supervision for workers; and significant youth involvement. Congress is best-positioned to create incentives to improve and standardize adoption practice within each state and to facilitate adoptions across state lines. To increase the number of adoptions, Congress should: 1. Reward both sending and receiving states for creating interstate adoptions. 2. Establish national standards for home studies and for descriptions of waiting children. 3. Eliminate long-term foster care as a goal. 4. Emphasize funding for post-adoption services. 5. Encourage development of a robust, comprehensive practice model of adoptions from foster care