Intergenerational Effects of Incarceration

NBER Working Paper No. 24227

Issued in January 2018

NBER Program(s):Children, Law and Economics, Labor Studies, Public Economics



An often overlooked population in discussions of prison reform is the children of inmates. How a child is affected depends both on what incarceration does to their parent and what they learn from their parent's experience. To overcome endogeneity concerns, we exploit the random assignment of judges who differ in their propensity to send defendants to prison. Using longitudinal data for Norway, we find that imprisonment has no effect on fathers’ recidivism but reduces their employment by 20 percentage points. We find no evidence that paternal incarceration affects a child's criminal activity or school performance.

Acknowledgments

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Document Object Identifier (DOI): 10.3386/w24227

Published: Manudeep Bhuller & Gordon B. Dahl & Katrine V. Loken & Magne Mogstad, 2018. "Intergenerational Effects of Incarceration," AEA Papers and Proceedings, vol 108, pages 234-40. citation courtesy of

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