although there is a significant positive relationship between the schooling of adoptive parents and the academic attainment of their adopted children, the effects are smaller than in the case of biological families. Finally, Sacerdote (2004) uses data about Korean-American adoptees who, as infants, were randomly assigned to their families: he finds a positive effect of parental education on the child’s schooling outcome, but that effect is much larger for biological children than for adoptees.

Although the legal concept of adoption cannot be easily transposed to the Rwandan context, this paper’s approach is very similar to the adoption strategy. Rwanda may have one of the highest percentages of orphans in the world because of the 1994 Genocide and the HIV/AIDS epidemic. The United Nations estimates that 800,000 Rwandans (10 percent of the population) died between April and July 1994 (Des Forges, 1999; Siaens, Subbarao, and Wodon, 2003). HIV prevalence among adults in Rwanda was estimated at 5.1 percent at the end of 2003 (UNAIDS, 2004). Many of the children who lost their parents have been welcomed in new households, where they may or may not have relatives. This process of family recomposition is, in essence, very similar to adoption.

This study contributes to the nature-nurture literature by using data from the Enquête Intégrale sur les Conditions de Vie des Ménages (EICV) 1999-2001. This data set contains not only information about the new “adoptive” parents’ education but also about the schooling levels of the biological parents.<sup>2</sup> In addition, the data also include information on the type of relationship (relative or not) between the “adopted” child and the head of the household. One of the main criticisms of the adoption strategy is that placement of adopted children might not be random: children left for adoption are placed in families with characteristics similar to their biological families. This is, of course, especially true in the case of adoption by relatives. The rich information contained in the EICV allows us to control for non-random placement and thus avoid this criticism.

In the main specification, the results indicate that, even after controlling for the schooling of the biological parents and the type of relationship linking the child and the head of his new household, the education of the most educated female adult in the new household has a positive and significant effect on the schooling of the child welcomed in the household. The magnitude of the effect is similar to the effect in a biological mother-child relationship. The effect of the education of the most educated male in the relationship is smaller than in a biological father-child relationship, but remains positive and significant. These results suggest that the nurture component of the intergenerational transmission of human capital is important, in particular for mothers, contrary to the evidence proposed by Behrman and Rosenzweig (2002) and Plug (2004). The analysis of interaction terms, however, indicates that these positive effects are only present for children related to the head of their new household (grandchildren and other relatives). When boys and girls are analyzed separately, it appears that, when the nurture component is isolated, the mother’s education matters more for girls, while the father’s education has a stronger effect on boy’s educational achievement.

> 2 To the best of my knowledge, only Björklund, Lindahl and Plug (2004) also use a data set containing information about the characteristics of the biological parents.

4