Child-Adoption Matching: Preferences for Gender and Race

Mariagiovanna Baccara, Allan Collard-Wexler, Leonardo Felli, Leeat Yariv

NBER Working Paper No. 16444
Issued in October 2010, Revised in April 2012
NBER Program(s):Industrial Organization Program

This paper uses a new data set on child-adoption matching to estimate the preferences of potential adoptive parents over U.S.-born and unborn children relinquished for adoption. We identify significant preferences favoring girls and unborn children close to birth, and against African-American children put up for adoption. These attitudes vary in magnitudes across different adoptive parents - heterosexual, same-sex couples, and single women. We also consider the effects of excluding single women and same-sex couples from the adoption process. In our data, such policies would substantially reduce the overall number of adopted children and have a disproportionate effect on African-American ones.

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Document Object Identifier (DOI): 10.3386/w16444

Published: Mariagiovanna Baccara & Allan Collard-Wexler & Leonardo Felli & Leeat Yariv, 2014. "Child-Adoption Matching: Preferences for Gender and Race," American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, American Economic Association, vol. 6(3), pages 133-58, July. citation courtesy of

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