Chapter 1: “State Responses to a Federal Matching Grant and Adoption from Foster Care.” The federal government reimburses states for adoption assistance – monthly cash subsidies – to families of children adopted from foster care through an open-ended matching grant. In this paper, I estimate the effect of states’ responses to the matching grant on foster children’s adoption outcomes. These outcomes are the likelihood of adoption, timing of adoption, and state designation of “special needs” to entitle children to federal grant support. To identify causal state responses, I exploit variation in children’s federal eligibility for grant support from expanded federal criteria introduced in 2010 that continues for children of different ages through 2018. First, I find that federal eligibility for federal grant support increases the probability of adoption only modestly, by about 9 percent. Second, I find the structure of the rollout of new criteria creates short-run distortions in state behavior with delays in adoptions for 1–3 months until children are of an age to qualify. Third, I do not find that state governments specifically designate children special needs to claim federal grant support. Overall, because the federal matching rates vary from 50 to 83 percent, representing large decreases in the state’s cost of adoption assistance, these results imply a small state response. Chapter 2: “The Effects of State Adoption Incentive Awards for Older Children on Adoptions from U.S. Foster Care.” This paper uses changes in the United States federal Adoption Incentives program in 2003 and 2008 to analyze states’ response to federal incentives to increase adoptions of children in the U.S. foster care system. The 2003 change introduced a $4,000 incentive paid to states for every adoption of a child aged 9 and older above a state-specific baseline number of adoptions. The 2008 change doubled this incentive to $8,000. I use a semi-parametric hazard model to compare the probability of adoption and timing of adoption among children aged above and below 9 years old in the time periods before and after the 2003 and 2008 changes. I do not find robust evidence that the incentives for older child adoptions resulted in increases in adoptions for older children. The findings illustrate the incentives are unable to help states overcome many of the challenges associated with achieving adoption for older children. Chapter 3: “Capitalization of Charter Schools into Residential Property Values.” While prior research has found clear impacts of schools and school quality on property values, little is known about whether charter schools have similar effects. Using sale price data for residential properties in Los Angeles County from 2008 to 2011 we estimate the neighborhood level impact of charter schools on housing prices. Using an identification strategy that relies on census block fixed-effects and variation in charter penetration over time, we find little evidence that the availability of a charter school affects housing prices on average. However, we do find that when restricting to districts other than Los Angeles Unified and counting only charter schools located in the same school district as the household, housing prices fall in response to an increase in nearby charter penetration.
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