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Parental Incarceration and Children's Educational Attainment

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  • Carolina Arteaga

Abstract

This paper presents new evidence showing that parental incarceration increases children's educational attainment. I collect criminal records for 90,000 low-income parents who have been convicted of a crime in Colombia, and link them with administrative data on the educational attainment of their children. I exploit exogenous variation in incarceration resulting from the random assignment of defendants to judges, and extend the standard framework to incorporate both conviction and incarceration decisions. I show that the effect of incarceration for a given conviction threshold can be identified. My results indicate that parental incarceration increases educational attainment by 0.78 years for the children of convicted parents on the margin of incarceration.

Suggested Citation

  • Carolina Arteaga, 2021. "Parental Incarceration and Children's Educational Attainment," Working Papers tecipa-703, University of Toronto, Department of Economics.
    • Handle: RePEc:tor:tecipa:tecipa-703
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    Cited by:

    1. Gaurav Khanna & Carlos Medina & Anant Nyshadham & Jorge Tamayo & Nicolas Torres, 2023. "Formal Employment and Organised Crime: Regression Discontinuity Evidence from Colombia," The Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 133(654), pages 2427-2448.
    2. Kailaheimo-Lönnqvist, Sanna & Kuja-Halkola, Ralf & Larsson, Henrik & Lichtenstein, Paul & Latvala, Antti, 2022. "Parental criminality and children's educational attainment: A population-based extended family study," Journal of Criminal Justice, Elsevier, vol. 81(C).
    3. Vishal Kamat & Samuel Norris & Matthew Pecenco, 2023. "Identification in Multiple Treatment Models under Discrete Variation," Papers 2307.06174, arXiv.org.

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    More about this item

    Keywords

    Incarceration; Education; Parenting;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • I24 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Education - - - Education and Inequality
    • J24 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demand and Supply of Labor - - - Human Capital; Skills; Occupational Choice; Labor Productivity
    • K42 - Law and Economics - - Legal Procedure, the Legal System, and Illegal Behavior - - - Illegal Behavior and the Enforcement of Law

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