Child Protection and Child Outcomes: Measuring the Effects of Foster Care
利用调查员轮换分配作为工具变量，研究寄养照护对儿童长期结果（如青少年犯罪、未成年生育和就业）的因果效应，发现处于安置边缘的儿童留在家中结果更好，尤其对年龄较大的儿童。
Little is known about the effects of placing children who are abused or neglected into foster care. This paper uses the placement tendency of child protection investigators as an instrumental variable to identify causal effects of foster care on long-term outcomes—including juvenile delinquency, teen motherhood, and employment—among children in Illinois where a rotational assignment process effectively randomizes families to investigators. Large marginal treatment effect estimates suggest caution in the interpretation, but the results suggest that children on the margin of placement tend to have better outcomes when they remain at home, especially older children.