The effect of lowering welfare payment ceilings on children's risk of out-of-home placement

Christopher Wildeman and Peter Fallesen

Children and Youth Services Review, 2017, vol. 72, issue C, 82-90

Abstract: Although much research considers the relationship between family income and child maltreatment, contact with child protective services (CPS), and out-of-home placement, little research provides a strong causal test of these different relationships. And, as such, it remains unclear how increasing or decreasing the generosity of social welfare programs could affect children's risk of experiencing maltreatment, CPS contact, and out-of-home placement. In this article, we use Danish registry data and a 2004 policy shock to estimate the effect of a substantial decrease in welfare generosity—a monthly reduction in disposable income of 30% for those who were on a specific form of welfare for six consecutive months or more—on children's risk of out-of-home placement. Our results indicate that this decrease in welfare generosity increased children's risk of out-of-home placement by about 1.5 percentage points in any given year, representing an increase of about 25% in the annual risk of out-of-home placement. The results also indicate that in a similar group of welfare-dependent individuals who were not affected by the policy shock, there is only a negligible increase in the risk of out-of-home placement, further buttressing the case for causal effects. Taken together, this article shows that substantial changes in the economic conditions of the poorest families can have a substantial effect on the probability that their children will be placed in out-of-home care.

Keywords: Child welfare; Out-of-home placement; Denmark; Register data; Welfare generosity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0190740916303401
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

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:eee:cysrev:v:72:y:2017:i:c:p:82-90

DOI: 10.1016/j.childyouth.2016.10.017

Access Statistics for this article

Children and Youth Services Review is currently edited by Duncan Lindsey

More articles in Children and Youth Services Review from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().