ABSTRACT
The 1997 Adoption and Safe Families Act (ASFA) gave incentives to states to expedite the adoption of children from foster care. Administrative data describe the changes in adoptive families from 1996 to 2003 in terms of the marital status and sex of the household head and in terms of the relationship of the parents to the child prior to adoption. Patterns in the way children with special needs were matched with different kinds of families are described. The data show that agencies have tapped the resources of families headed by single parents to provide permanency for older children and that older children adopted by fathers have spent more time as legal orphans than children adopted by single mothers.
ABSTRACT
Adoption assistance entitlements support children whose birth parents cannot care for them. The entitlements are meant to offset the extra cost to adoptive families of raising children whose early adverse experiences leave them with special needs. Unlike other Social Security Act programs, adoption assistance is not federally administered but is administered by states or localities. State-to-state variation in administration of this federal entitlement leads to unequal treatment of similar children. Moreover, although adoption assistance is an entitlement for children, payments made by many states are systematically correlated with the characteristics of adoptive families.
ABSTRACT
Since 1978 the federal government has implemented a variety of programs to promote the adoption of children from foster care. A key part of these programs has been the use of subsidies to lower the cost of adopting and parenting children who have been in foster care. Although subsidies are a key part of federal policy, there has been little empirical research on the effect of subsidies on adoption rates. This paper uses data from the Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System to estimate the impact of subsidy rates on adoption rates. Subsidies to families have a positive and statistically significant effect on adoption rates.
ABSTRACT
The Adoption and Safe Families Act of 2007 and its 2003 reauthorization offered bonuses to states that provide more children waiting in foster care with permanent families through adoption. Under ASFA, a majority of states increased the generosity of post-adoption financial support. Moreover, states increased the number and proportion of adopted children that received adoption assistance because the child had a special need. Administrative data indicate that states more diligently recorded the special needs of children, which was necessary to support increases in state requests for federal reimbursements and performance bonuses.
ABSTRACT
Federal initiatives since 1996 have intensified the efforts of states to achieve adoption for children in foster care. For many waiting children, the path to adoption is long. The authors offer an economic analysis of adoption from foster care, with an emphasis on the reasons why achieving the goal of adoption for all waiting children may be so difficult. The authors then estimate the determinants of adoptions from foster care across the states using data for fiscal years 1996 and 1997. Adoption assistance subsidy rates stand out as the most important determinant of adoptions from foster care, followed by use of alternatives (e.g., intercountry adoption). Adoptive matching on the basis of race does not appear to prevent adoptions from foster care in the aggregate, leaving flaws in the matching process, such as a lack of information and difficulty using the Interstate Compact on the Placement of Children (ICPC), as a primary reason why children wait.