A THEORY OF CHILD ADOPTION*

Dirk Bethmann; Michael Kvasnicka

doi:10.35866/caujed.2022.47.2.006

A THEORY OF CHILD ADOPTION*

Dirk Bethmann^*
, Michael Kvasnicka

^*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

Abstract

Women can bear own children or adopt them. Extending economic theories of fertility, we provide a first formal theoretical treatment of the demand for adoption. It is shown that the propensity to adopt a child increases in the degree of own altruism, infertility, relatedness and emotional attachment to the child, costs of own child birth, and any adoption-specific monetary return that is received net of the costs of adopting the child. Aggregate adoption statistics are broadly consistent with the predictions of our model.

Original language	English
Pages (from-to)	101-114
Number of pages	14
Journal	Journal of Economic Development
Volume	47
Issue number	2
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.35866/caujed.2022.47.2.006
Publication status	Published - 2022

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
* The research for this paper of the first author, Dirk Bethmann, has been supported by a Korea University Grant (K1509031). Our work has benefited from useful comments by Daniel Baumgarten, Sebastian Braun, Redzo Mujcic, Hendrik Ritter, and participants of the 13th annual conference of the Association for Public Economic Theory (APET) at Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan, and of the 27th annual conference of the European Society for Population Economics (ESPE) at Aarhus University, Denmark. All remaining errors are own.

Publisher Copyright:
© 2022, Journal of Economic Development. All Rights Reserved.

Keywords

Adoption
Altruism
Children
Demand for adoption
Fertility

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Finance
Economics and Econometrics

Access to Document

10.35866/caujed.2022.47.2.006

Cite this

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title = "A THEORY OF CHILD ADOPTION*",

abstract = "Women can bear own children or adopt them. Extending economic theories of fertility, we provide a first formal theoretical treatment of the demand for adoption. It is shown that the propensity to adopt a child increases in the degree of own altruism, infertility, relatedness and emotional attachment to the child, costs of own child birth, and any adoption-specific monetary return that is received net of the costs of adopting the child. Aggregate adoption statistics are broadly consistent with the predictions of our model.",

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author = "Dirk Bethmann and Michael Kvasnicka",

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doi = "10.35866/caujed.2022.47.2.006",

language = "English",

volume = "47",

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A THEORY OF CHILD ADOPTION*

Abstract

Bibliographical note

Keywords

ASJC Scopus subject areas

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