Can buy me love: the effect of child welfare expenditures on maltreatment outcomes

Abstract

I consider the effect of state level child welfare expenditures on child abuse victimization and fatality rates. The main result is that these expenditures are strongly associated with improved child maltreatment outcomes. Further, the well known negative association between income and child abuse is overstated if one fails to control for relevant policy differences that are correlated with economic circumstances. The effect of income diminishes further upon controlling for social attitudes correlated with income. The source of identification is a set of large and explicitly exogenous changes in child welfare expenditures induced by the circa 2000 recession. I show that endogeneity problems are small and tend to work against the result.