Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Poverty is among the strongest predictors of child maltreatment including child abuse and neglect (Berger & Waldfogel, 2011; Pelton, 2015). Therefore, federal and state income supports – such as the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) – may reduce the rates of child abuse and neglect if these policies change material hardship, parental stress, or other underlying determinants of child maltreatment. Klevens et al. (2017) found a positive relationship between a state having a refundable EITC and subsequent reductions in pediatric abusive head trauma. Berger et al. (2017) used the EITC as an exogenous income increase and found evidence of reductions in parenting behaviors that proxy for child maltreatment risk. Given that about 75% of all incidents of child maltreatment are neglect and considering the strong empirical associations between poverty and neglect documented previously, we hypothesize that state-level EITCs are most likely to reduce neglect rather than abuse rates.

Exploiting state-level variations in EITCs from 2004 to 2016 and using administrative data reported by Child Protective Services in the National Child Abuse and Neglect Data Systems (NCANDS), we estimate the relationship between state EITC generosity and rates of reported and substantiated child maltreatment. Our analysis encompasses several outcomes of interest related to child maltreatment and family’s involvement with the child welfare system: (1) overall CPS report rates; (2) type-specific CPS report rates (i.e., neglect, physical abuse, sexual abuse, emotional abuse, and other abuse report rates); (3) overall CPS substantiation rates; and (4) type-specific substantiation rates. Using a difference-in-differences design, we examine the association between state EITCs and each outcome for all children and by child race and age.

Preliminary results suggest that increases in the generosity of state EITCs lead to a decline in overall child maltreatment report rates. Our analyses control for a set of state-level policies that changed differentially by state over the study period, including minimum wage rates, Medicaid expansions through the Affordable Care Act, and state spending on early childhood care and education. Regression models also include a set of average demographic characteristics for each state, such as age and race composition, and educational attainment. Our study contributes to understanding potential health, and specifically violence-related, effects of the presence and generosity of the EITC.