The effect of foster care placement on paternal welfare dependency

TY - CONF

T1 - The effect of foster care placement on paternal welfare dependency

AU - Fallesen, Peter

PY - 2013

Y1 - 2013

N2 - The arrival of a child profoundly alters the life-course for men. Yet, children could change men's lives not only by arriving in them, but also by departing from them. In this article, I test how one such departure-foster care placement-affects men's labor market attachment, and in so doing I provide a novel parallel to existing research on how fatherhood affects men, which focuses almost exclusively on a child's arrival. Using population panel data from Denmark that include all first time fathers whose children were placed in foster care from 1995-2005, I find that having a child placed in foster care is associated with up to a 12 percentage point increase in welfare dependency. This result persists in analyses that control for individual and family level fixed effects, unobserved heterogeneity, and selection into having a child placed in foster care.

AB - The arrival of a child profoundly alters the life-course for men. Yet, children could change men's lives not only by arriving in them, but also by departing from them. In this article, I test how one such departure-foster care placement-affects men's labor market attachment, and in so doing I provide a novel parallel to existing research on how fatherhood affects men, which focuses almost exclusively on a child's arrival. Using population panel data from Denmark that include all first time fathers whose children were placed in foster care from 1995-2005, I find that having a child placed in foster care is associated with up to a 12 percentage point increase in welfare dependency. This result persists in analyses that control for individual and family level fixed effects, unobserved heterogeneity, and selection into having a child placed in foster care.

M3 - Paper

T2 - Population Association of America Annual Meeting

Y2 - 11 April 2013 through 13 April 2013

ER -