Department of Economics

This paper examines the effects of the Great Recession of 2007 to 2009 on the number ofchildren entering foster care due to maltreatment using data1 for 2004 to 2015. I usestandard OLS regressions with heteroskedastic robust standard errors in order toexamine the impact of the Great Recession, measured by the yearly unemployment rate,on children entering foster care due to physical abuse or neglect. Overall, I find littleevidence that there was an impact of the unemployment rate on entry into foster care.However, when looking across racial and ethnic groups, I find that Black children andAsian children were more or less susceptible, respectively, to entering foster care due tomaltreatment when there were increases in the unemployment rate during and after theGreat Recession.