What Parents Want: Evidence From Child Adoption

I missed the lecture, but hopefully Cal Tech will post this on iTunes store, some older presentations (until 2010) streaming theater site soon.

Wednesday, February 15, 2012 at 8:00 PM
Beckman Auditorium
Free
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Presented By:

Caltech Committee on Institute Programs

Adoption is an important phenomenon in the United States. Approximately 2.5 percent of all children, or 1.6 million, are adopted. The adoption process is fascinating for social scientists, allowing inspection of fundamental questions about preferences of parents for child attributes, such as race and gender, that are difficult to identify with biological chilen, where parents have limited freedom of choice. A new data set enables us to examine parents' attitudes and behavior in the domestic adoption process, while providing policymakers an evidence-driven base for evaluating the implications of highly debated policies, such as those restricting adoption by single-sex and foreign couples.

Leeat Yariv is Professor of Economics at Caltech.