The Criminal and Labor Market Impacts of Incarceration

This is a joint event with the Center for Labor Economics and the D-Lab. Lunch will be provided. 

This paper investigates the pre- and post-release impacts of incarceration on criminal behavior, economic wellbeing and family formation using original data from a natural experiment in Harris County, Texas. Two million criminal court records, accounting for 1.1 million unique defendants, were collected and merged to public and confidential administrative data sources. The research design identifies exogenous variation in the extensive and intensive margins of incarceration using the random assignment of defendants to courtrooms, and utilizes a new data-driven estimation procedure to eliminate two biases resulting from violations in the monotonicity assumption and the exclusion restriction.  The talk will present the findings of this paper while emphasizing the data collection and management techniques necessary to conduct this study.