Foster care placement is strongly associated with crime—for example, close to one fifth of the prison population in the U.S. is comprised of former foster children—yet there is little evidence on whether this relationship is causal. Leveraging the quasi-random assignment of investigators and administrative data from Michigan, we show that placement substantially reduced the chances of adult arrests, convictions, and incarceration for children at the margin. Exploring mechanisms, we find evidence that children’s birth parents made positive changes following placement. We show that most children in our setting reunified with their parents after being in foster care for one to two years, and that parents themselves were less likely to have criminal justice contact after placement. Considering recent historic federal policy which prioritizes keeping children with their families, our analysis indicates that safely reducing foster care caseloads will require improving efforts to ensure child wellbeing in the home.

This paper asks whether increasing public school funding can be an effective long-run crime-prevention strategy in the United States. Specifically, we examine the effect of increases in funding early in children’s lives on the likelihood that they are arrested as adults. We exploit quasi-experimental variation in public school funding, leveraging two natural experiments in Michigan and a novel administrative data set linking the universe of Michigan public school students to adult criminal justice records. The first research design exploits variation in operating expenditures due to Michigan’s 1994 school finance reform, Proposal A. The second design exploits variation in capital spending by leveraging close school district capital bond elections in a regression discontinuity framework. In both cases, we find that students exposed to additional funding during elementary school were substantially less likely to be arrested in adulthood. We show that the social benefits of increasing school funding are greater than the costs, even when considering only the crime-reducing benefits.

We develop empirical tools for studying discrimination in multi-phase systems, and apply them to the setting of foster care placement by child protective services. Leveraging the quasi-random assignment of two sets of decision-makers-initial hotline call screeners and subsequent investigators-we study how unwarranted racial disparities arise and propagate through this system. Using a sample of over 200,000 maltreatment allegations, we find that calls involving Black children are 55% more likely to result in foster care placement than calls involving white children with the same potential for future maltreatment in the home. Call screeners account for up to 19% of this unwarranted disparity, with the remainder due to investigators. Unwarranted disparity is concentrated in cases with potential for future maltreatment, suggesting that white children may be harmed by "under-placement" in high-risk situations.