Minimum wages and foster care placement disruption

Abstract

We examine the potential secondary impacts of raising the minimum wage in a jurisdiction on the efficiency of its foster care placement system. We employ the Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System (AFCARS) restricted-access dataset representing all children in the US foster care system for the years 2000–21. We calculate placement efficiency as the number of yearly moves experienced by a child in the foster care system, with a decrease in the number of placements interpreted as benefitting children both psychologically and behaviourally. This increase in stability benefits the foster parents and corresponds to a smaller financial strain on the public. After including various controls and state-year fixed effects, our Tobit and Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) analyses find that increased minimum wages are significantly associated with lower levels of placement disruption. We take this as promising initial descriptive evidence for the secondary effects of the minimum wage on reducing the financial burden, and increasing the placement efficiency, of the foster care system.