Preventing child maltreatment: Beneficial side effects of public childcare provision

Malte Sandner, Stephan Thomsen and Libertad Gonzalez

Economics Working Papers from Department of Economics and Business, Universitat Pompeu Fabra

Abstract: We investigate the impact of public childcare provision on the incidence of child maltreatment. For identification, we exploit a government reform that expanded early childcare in Germany, generating large temporal and spatial variation in childcare coverage at the county level. Using high-quality administrative data covering all reported cases of child maltreatment in Germany by county and year, our results show that an increase in childcare slots by one percentage point in a county led to a decline of 1.8% in child maltreatment cases. Our findings suggest that the provision of universal public childcare may be more cost-effective that previously thought.

Keywords: child maltreatment; child abuse and neglect; early childcare (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I38 J12 J13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020-10
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (14)

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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:upf:upfgen:1744

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