Aaron Sojourner: States often cut off payments to kids when they move from foster care into adoptive families or kin guardianships. Minnesota worried this might unintentionally slow moves out of foster care. In 2015, basically equalized payments for kids age 6+ but not for younger (Figure 1). What happened next?

States often cut off payments to kids when they move from foster care into adoptive families or kin guardianships. Minnesota worried this might unintentionally slow moves out of foster care. In 2015, basically equalized payments for kids age 6+ but not for younger (Figure 1). What happened next?

🔼 academic achievement 3 years after case start, exit rate from foster care to adoption & kin guardianship, payments, school stability, 🔽 school suspensions No change in foster re-entry rates. Details below.

Test score effects are big, +3²% of a standard deviation in the full sample of foster cases & +46% in the unlikely-to-reunify-with-family-of-origin sample, who are more likely to be affected by the policy. Children in foster care tend to score about 78% of a standard deviation below the state mean.

We beat this result up many different ways. Here's a specification curve. Each column is a different specification (outcome, sample, predictors...) with the associated point estimate & confidence intervals above. Specs are ordered with estimates ascending. Baseline specification is marked in blue.

An event study shows the older-younger (treated-control) difference normalized to be zero in the last cohort expected to be fully unexposed to the policy based on mean case length in the pre-reform period.

Given that this policy raised payments by only about $2K over the 3 years after case start and generated such large achievement effects, the payoffs seem big.

Great working with @davidesimon.bsky.social of UConn, Jon Pedersen & Heidi Ombisa Skallet of MN Dept of Human Services. Thnx Casey Family Programs for $ support & Minn-LInK for enabling administrative data linkages. NBER: www.nber.org/papers/w32560 Upjohn: research.upjohn.org/cgi/viewcont...

Financial Incentives for Adoption and Kin Guardianship Improve Achievement for Foster Childrenwww.nber.org Founded in 1920, the NBER is a private, non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to conducting economic research and to disseminating research findings among academics, public policy makers, an...

Very glad to see more work on this. Worked in family court for a while and it has such serious effects that we don't support guardians and kin caregivers and such in the same manner

Thanks, this evidence backs that up.

Connecticut already had this policy. The boy we fostered still gets payments even though we adopted him ten years ago.

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