Finnish Court-Ordered Foster Care Placement Data (LASTU)

This paper describes the construction of LASTU, a new individual-level datasetcovering all Finnish court-ordered out-of-home placement decisions from 2000to 2025 (n ≈ 14000). The dataset was built by digitising, pre-processing, andstructuring the free-text content of administrative court records, and linking theresulting case-level variables to the INVEST Full Population administrative registers. We document the data structure, the text-partitioning and variable-extractionpipeline, and the multi-stage validation protocol. The pipeline follows a rulesbased approach exploiting the highly consistent structure of Finnish court decisions to partition text into thematically defined segments before conducting extraction of variables . The resulting dataset enables causal analysis of placementeffects on children’s long-term educational, health, and labour market outcomesas well descriptive evidence, and supports research on the determinants of courtdecisions and regional variation in child welfare practice.