The Causal Impact of Removing Children from Abusive and Neglectful Homes

Anthony Bald, Eric Chyn, Justine S. Hastings, Margarita Machelett

NBER Working Paper No. 25419
Issued in January 2019, Revised in September 2019
NBER Program(s):Children, Economics of Education, Law and Economics, Public Economics

This paper measures impacts of removing children from families investigated for abuse or neglect. We use removal tendencies of child protection investigators as an instrument. We focus on young children investigated before age 6 and find that removal significantly increases test scores and reduces grade repetition for girls. There are no detectable impacts for boys. This pattern of results does not appear to be driven by heterogeneity in pre-removal characteristics, foster placements, or the type of schools attended after removal. The results are consistent with the hypothesis that development of abused and neglected girls is more responsive to home removal.

Acknowledgments

Machine-readable bibliographic record - MARC, RIS, BibTeX

Document Object Identifier (DOI): 10.3386/w25419