Travail et économie publique externe

Du 30/03/2023 de 12:30 à 13:30

PSE- 48 boulevard Jourdan, 74014 Paris, salle R1-09

HULL Peter (Brown University)

Racial Discrimination in Child Protection

Ten percent of Black children spend time in foster care, twice the rate of white children, with widespread concerns that this disparity is due to racial discrimination. We study the disparate impact of foster care placement decisions, as measured by racial disparities in placement rates among children with the same potential for future maltreatment. We account for the selective observability of future maltreatment potential by leveraging the quasi-random assignment of cases to investigators. Using administrative data from nearly 220,000 maltreatment investigations in Michigan between 2008 and 2016, we find that Black children are 1.7 percentage points (50%) more likely to be placed in foster care than white children with identical potential for future maltreatment. This result is robust to different measures of maltreatment potential and estimation strategies, and is not driven by observable case characteristics. Disparate impact is concentrated among cases where there is high risk of future maltreatment, with Black children twice as likely to be placed in foster care compared to white children (12% vs. 6%). Disparate impact is significantly larger among investigators who are white, who see a lower share of cases involving Black children, who are more experienced, and who have relatively high placement rates.