Rehabilitating convicted criminals is challenging; indeed, an important share of them return to prison only a few years after their release.Thus, finding effective ways of encouraging crime desistance, particularly among young individuals, has become an important policy goal to reduce crime and incarceration rates.This paper provides causal evidence that the local institutions of the neighborhood that receives young individuals after prison matter.Specifically, we show that the opening of an Evangelical church reduces twelve-months re-incarceration rates among property crime offenders by more than 10 percentage points.This effect represents a drop of 16% in the probability of returning to prison for this group of individuals.We find smaller and less precise effects for more severe types of crime.We discuss two classes of mechanisms that could explain our results: religiosity and social support.We provide evidence that the social support provided by evangelical churches is an important driver of our findings.This suggests that non-religious local institutions could also play an important role in the rehabilitation of former inmates.

Do elite colleges help talented students join the social elite or help incumbent elites retain their positions? We combine intergenerationally linked data from Chile with a regression discontinuity design to show that, looking across generations, elite colleges do both. Lower-status individuals who gain admission to elite college programs transform their children’s social environment. Children become more likely to attend high-status private schools and colleges and to live near and befriend high-status peers. In contrast, academic achievement is unaffected. Simulations combining descriptive and quasi-experimental findings show that elite colleges tighten the link between social and human capital while decreasing intergenerational social mobility.

Family and social networks are widely believed to influence important life decisions, but causal identification of those effects is notoriously challenging. Using data from Chile, Croatia, Sweden, and the United States, we study within-family spillovers in college and major choice across a variety of national contexts. Exploiting college-specific admissions thresholds that directly affect older but not younger siblings’ college options, we show that in all four countries a meaningful portion of younger siblings follow their older sibling to the same college or college-major combination. Older siblings are followed regardless of whether their target and counterfactual options have large, small, or even negative differences in quality. Spillover effects disappear, however, if the older sibling drops out of college, suggesting that older siblings’ college experiences matter. That siblings influence important human capital investment decisions across such varied contexts suggests that our findings are not an artifact of particular institutional detail but a more generalizable description of human behavior. Causal links between the postsecondary paths of close peers may partly explain persistent college enrollment inequalities between social groups, and this suggests that interventions to improve college access may have multiplier effects.