Preventing Child Maltreatment: Beneficial Side Effects of Public Childcare Provision

Malte Sandner and Stephan Thomsen

Hannover Economic Papers (HEP) from Leibniz Universität Hannover, Wirtschaftswissenschaftliche Fakultät

Abstract: We investigate the impact of childcare provision on cases of child maltreatment. For identification, we exploit a governmental reform introducing mandatory early childcare in Germany that generated large temporal and spatial variation in childcare coverage at the county-level. Using high-quality administrative data covering all reported child maltreatment cases in a county per year, our results show that maltreatment cases decline by 1.8% if a county increases childcare slots by one percentage point. Because child maltreatment leads to enormous societal costs, we provide evidence that the provision of universal public childcare can prevent some of these costs.

Keywords: Child maltreatment; Child abuse and neglect; Early childcare; Prevention (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I38 J12 J13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 45 pages
Date: 2020-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eur
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (12)

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http://diskussionspapiere.wiwi.uni-hannover.de/pdf_bib/dp-669.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Preventing Child Maltreatment: Beneficial Side Effects of Public Childcare Provision (2020)
Working Paper: Preventing child maltreatment: Beneficial side effects of public childcare provision (2020)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:han:dpaper:dp-669

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