Richard Akresh from Illinios will be giving a seminar Friday 3 March. His main research area is development economics and he has worked on areas like child fostering, health and civil war. The title of the paper is "School Enrollment Impacts of Non-traditional Household Structure". The abstract is below:

Children growing up away from their biological parents may experience lower human capital investment. This paper measures the impact of child fostering on school enrollment using fixed effects regressions to address the endogeneity of fostering. Data collection by the author involved tracking and interviewing the sending and receiving household participating in each fostering exchange, allowing a comparison of foster children with their non-fostered biological siblings. Young foster children are 17.5 and 17.9 percent more likely to be enrolled after fostering than their host and biological siblings, respectively. This schooling improvement translates into a long-run improvement in educational and occupational attainment.