Abstract

We investigate the impact of childcare provision and employment conditions of women on cases of child abuse and neglect using unique administrative data that covers all child protection cases in Germany. For identification, we exploit a reform that generated large temporal and spatial variation in childcare coverage. Our measure of child abuse and neglect comes from a unique administrative data set that covers all child protection cases on the German county level for several years. The estimated ITT effect shows a decline by 0.24 cases per 1,000 children if a county increases childcare slots above the median. This is an economically highly relevant effect given the enormous costs of child abuse and neglect for the society. Our results show that the provision of universal public child care can be an effective policy to prevent part of these costs.