The aim of this article is to assess the role of early childhood education and care (ECEC) program access and generosity on child maltreatment as measured by Child Protective Services (CPS) reports. Using administrative data capturing CPS reports in the United States, I estimate the role of Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF) child-care subsidies, Head Start, Early Head Start, state prekindergarten, and universal prekindergarten programs on CPS reports using ordinary least squares and multilevel models. I exploit exogenous variation in state prekindergarten enrollment shocks to compare the CPS reports across children’s age-based eligibility using difference-in-difference-in-difference and event-history frameworks. Results suggest that the largest welfare gains in program access may occur among the youngest children (under age 3), the group for whom program access is most constrained. However, findings from state-level models provide weak overall evidence of a lower-bound benefit.

中文翻译：

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美国的幼儿教育和保育计划：访问是否能提高儿童安全？

本文的目的是评估儿童保护服务 (CPS) 报告衡量的儿童早期教育和护理 (ECEC) 计划的获取和慷慨对虐待儿童的作用。使用在美国捕获 CPS 报告的行政数据，我使用普通最小二乘法估计了儿童保育和发展基金 (CCDF) 托儿补贴、启蒙、早期启蒙、州学前班和通用学前班计划在 CPS 报告中的作用和多层次模型。我利用州幼儿园入学冲击的外生变化，使用差异中的差异和事件历史框架比较儿童基于年龄的资格的 CPS 报告。结果表明，最大的福利收益可能发生在最年幼的儿童（3 岁以下）中，程序访问受到最大限制的组。然而，州级模型的结果提供了下限收益的弱整体证据。