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Mario Pagliero, Ph.D.

University of Turin, Italy

Authors: Mario Pagliero and Aleksey Tetenov

Abstract: We estimate the effect of various characteristics of Italian couples on their demand for adopted and biological children. We use a unique choice-based sample which includes all Italian couples that requested court authorization to adopt unrelated children in 2003. Identifi…cation comes from exogeneity of couples’ fecundity status: we assume that infecund couples have the same distribution of preferences, but face a smaller choice set than fecund couples. We estimate the parameters using conditional maximum likelihood. To improve the precision of our estimates, we combine the data with a general survey of families which on its own would not provide sufficient information on adoption choice.  

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