Answer:
This paper uses a new data set on domestic child adoption to document the preferences of
potential adoptive parents over born and unborn babies relinquished for adoption by their birth
mothers. We show that adoptive parents exhibit significant biases in favor of girls and against
African-American babies. A non-African-American baby relinquished for adoption attracts the
interest of potential adoptive parents with probability 11.5% if it is a girl and 7.9% if it is a
boy. As for race, a non-African-American baby has a probability of attracting the interest of
an adopting parent at least seven times as high as the corresponding probability for an African-
American baby. In addition, we show that a child’s desirability in the adoption process depends
significantly on time to birth (increasing over the pregnancy, but decreasing after birth) and on
adoption costs. We also document the attitudes toward babies’ characteristics across different
categories of adoptive parents – heterosexual and same-sex couples, as well as single women
and foreign couples. Finally, we consider several recently discussed policies excluding same-
sex and foreign couples from the adoption process. In our data, such policies would reduce the
number of adopted babies by 6% and 33%, respectively.
JEL classification: J13, J15, J16, C78
Keywords: Child Adoption, Gender Bias, Racial Bias, Search, Matching.
∗We thank Luca Anderlini, Oriana Bandiera, Heski Bar-Isaac, Cristian Bartolucci, Tim Besley, Chantal Collard,
Federico Echenique, Ray Fisman, Carola Frege, Maia Güell, Luigi Guiso, Ali Hortacsu, Soohyung Lee, Alessandro
Lizzeri, Hong Luo, Nicola Persico, Ronny Razin, Sevi Rodríguez Mora, Jean-Laurent Rosenthal, Bernard Salanié,
Gianluca Violante, and Yoram Weiss for helpful conversations and comments. We are especially grateful to Alistair
Wilson for outstanding research assistance. Finally, we thank the adoption professionals that offered us invaluable
