Working Paper: NBER ID: w24186
Authors: Will Dobbie; Hans Grnqvist; Susan Niknami; Märten Palme; Mikael Priks
Abstract: We estimate the causal effect of parental incarceration on children’s medium-run outcomes using administrative data from Sweden. Our empirical strategy exploits exogenous variation in parental incarceration from the random assignment of criminal defendants to judges with different incarceration tendencies. We find that the incarceration of a parent in childhood leads to significant increases in teen crime and pregnancy and a significant decrease in early-life employment. The effects are concentrated among children from the most disadvantaged families, where teen crime increases by 18 percentage points, teen pregnancy increases by 8 percentage points, and employment at age 20 decreases by 28 percentage points. In contrast, there are no detectable effects among children from more advantaged families. These results imply that the incarceration of parents with young children may increase the intergenerational persistence of poverty and criminal behavior, even in affluent countries with extensive social safety nets.
Keywords: parental incarceration; children's outcomes; Sweden; intergenerational effects; social costs
JEL Codes: J13; J24; J62; K14; K42
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| Parental incarceration (J12) | Teen crime rates (K42) |
| Parental incarceration (J12) | Teen pregnancy rates (J13) |
| Parental incarceration (J12) | Employment at age 20 (J29) |
| Parental incarceration (J12) | Teen crime rates (disadvantaged families) (J12) |
| Parental incarceration (J12) | Teen pregnancy rates (disadvantaged families) (J12) |