Citation

Klevens J, Schmidt B, Luo F, Xu L, Ports KA, Lee RD. Public Health Rep. (1974) 2017; 132(4): 505-511.

Affiliation

National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Atlanta, GA, USA.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2017, Association of Schools of Public Health)

DOI

10.1177/0033354917710905

PMID

28609181

Abstract

OBJECTIVES: Policies that increase household income, such as the earned income tax credit (EITC), have shown reductions on risk factors for child maltreatment (ie, poverty, maternal stress, depression), but evidence is lacking on whether the EITC actually reduces child maltreatment. We examined whether states' EITCs are associated with state rates of hospital admissions for abusive head trauma among children aged <2 years.

METHODS: We conducted difference-in-difference analyses (ie, pre- and postdifferences in intervention vs control groups) of annual rates of states' hospital admissions attributed to abusive head trauma among children aged <2 years (ie, using aggregate data). We conducted analyses in 14 states with, and 13 states without, an EITC from 1995 to 2013, differentiating refundable EITCs (ie, tax filer gets money even if taxes are not owed) from nonrefundable EITCs (ie, tax filer gets credit only for any tax owed), controlling for state rates of child poverty, unemployment, high school graduation, and percentage of non-Latino white people.

RESULTS: A refundable EITC was associated with a decrease of 3.1 abusive head trauma admissions per 100 000 population in children aged <2 years after controlling for confounders ( P =.08), but a nonrefundable EITC was not associated with a decrease ( P =.49). Tax refunds ranged from $108 to $1014 and $165 to $1648 for a single parent working full-time at minimum wage with 1 child or 2 children, respectively.

CONCLUSIONS: Our findings with others suggest that policies such as the EITC that increase household income may prevent serious abusive head trauma.

Language: en

Keywords

child abuse; child maltreatment; policy evaluation