The relationship between unemployment and child maltreatment: A county-level perspective in California

The conventional logic supported by research and statistics suggests that there will be more child maltreatment as the economy becomes worse and less child maltreatment as the economy becomes better. However, in some local jurisdictions in California, statistics indicate the opposite. A closer examination of one county, San Mateo, suggests that this may be due to the fact that the County has a very high Self-Sufficiency Standard in which people get jobs with incomes that do not exceed the Standard, but in fact disqualifies them from the safety net of Federal benefits. Further, children born around the time of the last recession have a higher chance of adverse mental health issues and are now entering schools with issues that may reflect child abuse and neglect.     

Neighborhood disorder and individual economic self-sufficiency: New evidence from a quasi-experimental study

This paper draws on data from the Monitoring Mt. Laurel Study, a new survey-based study that enables us to compare residents living in an affordable housing project in a middle-class New Jersey suburb to a comparable group of non-residents. Building on the theoretical and empirical contributions of the Gautreaux and Moving to Opportunity studies, we test the hypothesis that living in this housing project improves a poor person’s economic prospects relative to what they would have experienced in the absence of such housing, and that these improved prospects can be explained at least in part by reduced exposure to disorder and stressful life events. We find that residents in the Ethel Lawrence Homes are significantly less likely to experience disorder and negative life events and that this improvement in circumstances indirectly improves the likelihood of being employed, their earnings, and the share of income from work. We find no relationship between residence in the housing project and the likelihood of using welfare.