The Impact of Unemployment on Child Maltreatment in the United States

Dan Brown and Elisabetta De Cao

No 837, Economics Series Working Papers from University of Oxford, Department of Economics

Abstract: Abstract In this paper, we show that unemployment increases child neglect in the United States during the period from 2004 to 2012. A one percentage point increase in the unemployment rate leads to a 20 percent increase in neglect. We identify this effect by instrumenting for the county-level unemployment rate with a Bartik instrument, which we create as the weighted average of the national-level unemployment rates across each of twenty industries, where the weights are the county-level fraction of the employed working-age population in each industry at the start of the sample period. An important mechanism behind this effect is that parents lack social and private safety nets. The effect on neglect is smaller in states that introduce longer extensions to unemployment benefits, and is greater in counties where an initially larger fraction of children are not covered by health insurance. We find no evidence that the effect is driven by alcohol consumption or divorce.

Keywords: child abuse and neglect; unemployment rate; recession; safety net; unemployment insurance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I10 J12 J13 J65 K42 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017-09-25
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dem and nep-law
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:52be5229-32c3-430c-a2ed-b3691000d6aa (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oxf:wpaper:837

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Economics Series Working Papers from University of Oxford, Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Anne Pouliquen ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).