Abstract: This paper considers the effect of child welfare expenditures on child abuse victimization and fatality rates using a state-level panel. Much of the identification rests on recent, exogenous changes in child welfare spending induced by the recession and substantial state-level variation in response to various changes in federal funding streams. The central finding is that child welfare spending has a highly significant effect on both victimization and fatality rates. Further, the results suggest that the well-documented association between income and child abuse is overstated if one fails to control for relevant local policy variables. This paper is also original in controlling for measures of social attitudes separately from economic measures.