To combat the spread of COVID-19, many primary and secondary schools in the United States canceled classes and moved instruction online. This study examines an unexplored consequence of COVID-19 school closures: the broken link between child maltreatment victims and the number one source of reported maltreatment allegations—school personnel. Using current, county-level data from Florida, we estimate a counterfactual distribution of child maltreatment allegations for March and April 2020, the first two months in which Florida schools closed. While one would expect the financial, mental, and physical stress due to COVID-19 to result in additional child maltreatment cases, we find that the actual number of reported allegations was approximately 15,000 lower (27%) than expected for these two months. We leverage a detailed dataset of school district staffing and spending to show that the observed decline in allegations was largely driven by school closures. Finally, we discuss policy implications of our findings for the debate surrounding school reopenings and suggest a number of responses that may mitigate this hidden cost of school closures.

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How do communication costs affect the creation of scientific output? This study examines changes in scientific output and citation patterns following an institution’s connection to the National Science Foundation Network (NSFNET), an early version of the Internet. Established in 1985 to connect five NSF-sponsored supercomputers, the NSFNET national internet backbone quickly expanded to universities across the United States by linking existing and newly formed, wide-area regional computer networks. I estimate the effect of connection to the national internet backbone on citations per paper by exploiting plausibly exogenous variation in the connection times of the regional NSFNET networks. Following connection to the national NSFNET, average citations per paper increase by over 10% relative to the pre-connection mean. Subgroup analyses reveal that the net effect was driven largely by middle- and top-tier institutions. Finally, I show that NSFNET connection led to a decline in interdisciplinary citations and an increase in within-field citations.