Principal Investigator Joseph Doyle
Project Start Date June 2006
The child welfare system investigates over 2 million children each year for parental abuse or neglect, yet little is known about the effect of removing children from home and placing them in foster care. Outcomes are rarely observed, and children placed in foster care likely differ from those not placed, making comparisons difficult. This paper uses the removal tendency of investigators as an instrumental variable to identify causal effects of foster care placement on a range of long-term outcomes, including juvenile delinquency, teen motherhood, employment, and earnings. These tendencies are found to predict foster care placement, despite a rotational assignment process that effectively randomizes families to investigators. The estimation focuses on children at the margin of placement, where investigators may disagree about removal. The results point to better delinquency, teen motherhood, and employment outcomes for children when they remain at home, though large instrumental variables point estimates and relatively large standard errors suggest caution in the interpretation.