Abstract: 

Despite prominent disparities in child mortality, the child protection system’s impact on child death disparities has received limited attention. Leveraging close to random assignments of workers to families in an American county, this paper provides the first causal estimates of the child protection system on child deaths. I find that opening a child welfare case drastically reduces such child deaths. Extrapolating from these local average treatment effects, the black-white child mortality gap would be more than three larger without child welfare involvement.